Beth Atkinson

I have been surrounded by art my entire life. I come from a family of artists who have worked in just about every medium possible so that has made it very easy for me explore any material I desired. I consider myself primarily a printmaker working in etching, woodcut, linoleum, silkscreen and monotypes but I also work in book arts, collage and sculpture as well.

My first love in printmaking was working with relief prints. Carving from linoleum and wood was therapeutic for me. The smell of the wood and the way the knives cut through the material to create the image connected me to my art and made what I did complete for me. The process was just as important and the product.  My prints are done in very small editions and most pieces are one of a kind as I usually embellish each print individually which makes each piece unique in its own right.

Much of the work that I do is influenced by my travels and are reflective of my visual and emotional experiences. Some of the work that I create is extremely realistic and detailed and other pieces are more abstract focusing on line and color.

My sculptural pieces are assemblages of ephemera and most of them connect to book arts which is another love of mine.  I have always been a collector, saving scraps of paper from different events, ticket stubs, old photographs, small tokens and pieces of my past, pieces of these stories, never able to throw anything away because I was married to the memories that they held. As my art has evolved these pieces of ephemera became a focal point of some of my work. Frequently I assemble these pieces both two dimensionally as well as three dimensionally  to create a story that is personal to me but may make the viewer create one of their own, maybe triggering a memory from their past as well.

As a whole the variety in my work can best be described as eclectic, but all of the imagery has a connection to what I have experienced through my relationships and travels.