Artist Ann Kittredge
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Kittredge in her Woodstock studio.
“I’m feeling into paint these days, finishing some old work,” she says.
Ann Kittredge grew up in Ontario and moved to the Woodstock area in 1988. She has several degrees including a Bachelor of Education and masters in arts (biology) as well as fine art. As an educator, she has taught at the high school and community college levels and now works as an adjunct instructor in the fine arts program at the University of Maine at Presque Isle (U.M.P.I.). She practices her art in printmaking, watercolour, acrylic, pastels, graphite and charcoal. Billing herself as a mixed media artist, Kittredge is also well known for her etchings which are widely available in this area.
Even though I taught science, I always have had an interest in art. At one point I even went back and took grade 11 art at night to get the basics down. Then, when we moved here, I started taking art courses in Houlton which led to getting my B.F.A. at U.M.P.I.
Where was your first show?
I was a member of the Woodstock Art Club and we had a show at the L.P. Fisher Library. I had a painting of a nude but they put it away because too many kids were gawking. I guess I had a lot of nerve.
Despite that experience, we still see the occasional discrete nude in your work today. Which takes me to something about which I know very little: etching technique.
I use zinc plates. You coat the plate with a tar-like substance called ground, then scratch (or mark) the image into the ground. The plate goes into an acid bath which eats (etches) it at the exposed marks. After cleaning the plate, you push thick ink across the plate and wipe the surface thoroughly so that the ink remains only in the etched lines. To print, I use watercolour paper on a press that has crushing pressure (you can see the plate’s ridge in the paper).
That’s a lot of fuss it seems to me. Does that mean that etchings are expensive?
Price isn’t really connected to the value. In a larger centre, a small etching could be $100 to $200 but here we’re usually looking at $15 to $60. I can make up to 100 prints from a single plate but I don’t live on art sales!
Here’s good example of a large etching that is quite complex. Is there a story here?
When I was a teenager, my father said to me, “Why don’t you go to normal school?” I didn’t know what that was. This building, in Fredericton, I first saw in 1971 ─ its last year as a normal school. When we moved back here 25 years ago, the raised relief sign (that had proclaimed Normal School) had been scraped off and was now engraved “Justice”. You can still see where they sawed off the old letters. I wanted to do something with that. I started small then went big: 4-by-5, 6-by-8, 18-by-20 inches.
What’s on your creative horizon now?
With the etchings, I have annual binges although I’m not very prolific. There are a few new plates and some mixed media Christmas things. And I’ve gotten interested in the Dream Rocket project where donated two-foot-square quilt panels will be pieced together and will eventually wrap a 363-foot-long (110.6 meters) Saturn 5 rocket at the Davidson Center for Space Exploration in Huntsville, Alabama. (See photo below.)
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Based on the theme of immigration, dozens of two-foot squares, painted by students at Woodstock’s Centennial Elementary School, will be on exhibit at the a Lowell National Historical Park in Lowell, Massachusetts prior to being added to the Saturn 5 quilt wrapping project in 2015. “Heather Everett called me about an art day at the school,” Kittredge remembers. “I went in and the kids did these. Most of the panels have a flag in them” |