Florence McEwin
I live and work in Wyoming from my Green River and Meeteetse studios, as an artist of print and paint mediums. I grew up on the East Coast, north of Boston receiving a BFA from UMA, (Amherst), where I was fortunate to study with Chuck Close. Later, I obtained an MA from UWY and then a Ph.D. from NTU (Denton TX), College of the Visual Arts, documenting and analyzing 20th Century American Women Artists. My work has been included in venues nationally across the USA and internationally in Japan, Canada, Italy, Germany, England, Scotland, the Netherlands and France to name most but not all of the places the work has traveled. I have been honored with many awards for the work, among those the 2009 and 2017 Wyoming State Visual Arts Fellowships and the George and Helen Segal Foundation (NJ) Award in Paint. I received an international print award in 2005 in Beijing China. I am a former Professor of Art and Gallery Director at Western Wyoming College in Rock Springs and, presently since the spring of 2019, Professor Emeritus. My narrative work always considers the spirit of the process, developing its’ own contemporary ethos, along the way.
In this revisionist work of Red Riding Hood, the real, the interpreted and the imagined find their way as mixed metaphors, exploring life after Red Riding Hood and the wolf become involved. Present are male-female tensions considered with a playful twist of feminine empowerment. It is a hand-pulled non-traditional photo intaglio, with chine collé of found or invented applications of paper. Within this process, I re-contextualize my pleasures of childhood play – paper dolls, books, and puzzles. Ephemera of appropriated magazine imagery and storybooks are processed through the imagination and manipulated. My search for image appropriation led me to a stash of magazines above a chicken house and former hired hand bunk on the Larsen ranch in Meeteetse. My friend’s grandmother had kept every magazine she received since 1922, a veritable treasure trove! When coupled with drawn and cut imagery the print narrative emerges.
Within this creative play, I am conscious of materials and applications to embed the prints with visual innuendos that reflect on my surroundings and social mores of the west.