ARTIST OF THE WEEK Erin Holscher Almazan in one of her home work spaces.
“In the summer I take over the garage and do oil painting” she told me. “When the weather gets cooler I move to a basement space and do linocuts. I don’t want to fill the house with paint fumes. I do the actual printmaking from my linocuts at the University of Dayton, where I am an associate professor of Printmaking and Drawing.”
I looked at the paintings in the garage and said I hadn’t seen anything quite like them on Erin’s website (http://
“These are new this summer” she said. “For the last few years I have been focused on women’s relationships, the dynamics of groups of women. This year my friend Anna who is a fashion designer visited and brought these amazing floral hats. We took lots of photos of a group of women wearing her hats to use as the beginning point of these paintings. I took some of the smaller ones to a solo show I just had at the Western Colorado Center for the Arts in Grand Junction.”
“I have been painting some portraits of women with the hats, and some pairs of women. The one I’m working on today shows Anna with her head on my shoulder. I haven’t painted larger groups of women yet. I will probably do linocuts of those more complex images.”
Erin will be one of the artists participating in the “Behind the Scenes” exhibition at K12 Gallery and TEJAS which runs from October 24 through November 14. Maybe she’ll bring the piece she was painting when I visited her at work.
