Style Weekly
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Ghost in the Print
by Paulette Roberts-Pullen
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Katherine McGinn's painting and printing on thin papers, sometimes of her own making, straddle two worlds. One is made of ethereal imagery buoyed by translucent inks and delicate pencil marks. The other world, often existing within the same frame, is a suggestion of damp earth and botanical forms rendered in greens and rusts.
In her solo show of monotypes, woodcuts and watercolors at Eric Schindler Gallery through Nov. 6, McGinn marries thin layers of overlapping color with graphic punctuation, creating dreamy abstractions with hints of still life and landscape.
Clearly confident and in control of her media, McGinn, who lives in North Carolina, exhibits a number of relatively diminutive images that prove her ability to balance intuition with visual and technical smarts. The ghostly figures embedded in so many of her prints exemplify how she underpins a suggestion of informality with a mastery of the printing process.
But it's her larger images that are the most exciting, if not for compositional resolution then at least for risks taken. Exploring the extra square inches of blank paper with zeal, McGinn graphically describes meetings of earth, sky, reality and imagination that are not only recognizable, but appealingly magnetic.
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