Gathering Circuitry Over Scottish Lowlands is a color monotype created in 2022 by American artist Kevin Fletcher. It is pencil signed, titled, dated and inscribed “I/I" / Monotype in 1 pass from copper plate on Rives BFK.” It was printed by the artist and the platemark measures 8-15/16 x 6 inches.
“Making monotypes allows for a fairly rapid turnover of ideas since the ink is applied to the matrix directly as in painting, but more diluted down. So, it’s somewhere in consistency of pigment between oil paint and watercolor paint, but is also oil based, so it doesn’t set-up, can be worked with rags, rollers, chips or spatulas. When I work with the ink, I may have some kind of contextual intention, but it is not typically specific. I often have less grasp of particulars and just carry an emotive condition, often driven by some news items or social observation.
My training in drawing and painting has always encouraged an indulgence of Abstract Expressionism principles of “automatic writing” and imagery that arises from the subconscious. Monotype and mark making can be liberating that way so I dig about and layer up treatments with an open vision, hoping the field, the picture plane itself, yields an opportunity, a foothold. The color prints I’ve been doing have called on different pacing to some degree, as they are tight in registration and the marks repeated, but they have aimed at a mostly hushed interiority—are approximations of my concern over events around us. I will only say that these prints are a way of my sending out some kind of well-wishing, quiet and modest thought, support for possible good. It sounds a bit naïve and soft boiled, but that’s how it is.”
Kevin Fletcher, painter, printmaker, teacher, collector, and curator, was born in Cincinnati, Ohio on 7 May 1956. He received his BFA in printmaking and graphic design from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio in 1978 and, the following year, he attended Northern Illinois University for graduate study in printmaking and art history. In 1981, Fletcher earned his MFA in printmaking from Syracuse University. In the early 1980s, He worked for six months at Grafica Uno in Milano, Italy. Fletcher taught drawing, printmaking, watercolor, history of printmaking, and western art history courses at the Santa Rosa Junior College in Northern California for thirty years. He was the Visiting Studio Artist at Pennsylvania School for the Arts, California State Fullerton, Shasta College, Pacific Northwest College of Art, Seattle Printmaking Collective, and San Jose State University.
Fletcher has had at least twenty solo exhibitions and he has been included in numerous national and international group exhibitions. He curated a number of exhibitions at the Santa Rosa Junior College during his tenure. Fletcher was awarded First Prize in Printmaking from the Berkeley Art Center's Annual National Exhibition (2007), a First Award from the Greater Midwest International Prints Exhibition XIV at Central Missouri State University (1999), Monotype Award from the Pacific Prints Annual at the Palo Alto Cultural Center (1992), First Prize in Printmaking from the Berkeley Art Center's Annual National Exhibition (1990), and First Prize from the Fourth National Print Exhibition at the Westwood Center for the Arts in Los Angeles (1981).
Kevin Fletcher's work is represented in the collections of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp; the Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio; the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; the Hunterian, University of Glasgow; the Frans Masereel Centrum, Kasterlee, Belgium; the City of Portland and the Portland Art Museum, Oregon; the Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, New York; the Robert F. Agrella Art Gallery, Santa Rosa Junior College; the Jundt Museum at Gonzaga University, Spokane; the Syracuse University Art Museum, New York; the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; the University of Wisconsin at Waukesha; and the Martin von Wagner Museum at the University of Würzburg, Germany.
