Sara Youngman

Artist Statement

Art has been an integral part of my life; I grew up in homes filled with art and family vacations were only to cities with art museums. I’ve always known there was an artist inside of me screaming to be let out, but I allowed childhood inadequacies to keep me from artistic endeavors for over 40 years.

On March 28, 2008 my inner-artist was finally released when a local artist/friend spent the day, in her studio, showing me how to do drypoint. (On November 21, 2009, in a two-hour session, she taught me hard ground etching.) I was hooked; went home, turned my guest bedroom into a studio, bought tools, plexiglas (considerably less expensive than copper) and paper and began, somewhat feverishly, to create drypoint plates. I printed once a week from May 2008 through Thanksgiving.

In that time I created over 40 good images. I printed only twice between Thanksgiving and May 2009 when my own Conrad press was finally built and delivered. I filled the time creating a few plates, doing some pen & ink drawings and hand-coloring prints. Since the arrival of my own press I’ve slowed down considerably, and am enjoying teaching myself new techniques, i.e, soft ground etching, chine collé, hand-inking multiple colors onto one plate.

More succinctly, I am going about this in a very non-linear manner – more or less from the middle backwards. My designs are like free-form poetry, with some images taken from photographs of my garden and cats. When I first began coloring images I used paints – acrylics and watercolors – but ultimately found the process unsatisfying. I’ve since discovered various artist pens which are more my style. I’m enjoying experimenting with colored inks, multi-colored images, embossing and chine collé. Even though I occasionally print on grey or cream paper, I prefer clean black lines on white paper, although I take great pride in a few new plates which combine soft and hard ground etching with drypoint and are hand-inked with up to five colors.

I have been fortunate to have my work appear in over 20 juried regional shows in Kalamazoo, Muskegon, Lowell and Grand Rapids, to gallery shows in Spring Lake, Ann Arbor, Birmingham and Michigan City, IN, to a women artist’s show in Austin, TX. I will have a solo show in August 2010 at One Trick Pony, a Grand Rapids restaurant. And, although I chose not to pursue it, being accepted, at 55, with only a six-month old portfolio, into GVSU as an art student was a high point in my life.