Terra Fortis – “Strong Land” (Latin)

Description

On the back of the card:
Mary grew up in England where many of the images she loved in children’s books were created with various printmaking methods. Perhaps this is why, as an artist, she has such an innate gift and passion for this artform. She has won many awards with organizations such as The Federation of Canadian Artists.
“To celebrate Canada’s 150th birthday, I wanted to create a piece that included all of the things that inspire me about Canada’s amazing geography – the sun setting over the mountains, with lakes and hills and prairies in the front… I had learned this particular printmaking process recently and wanted to try it out.”
Drypoint etching has historically been done with copper or zinc plates, but printmakers are innovators, using what is at hand when they can, and this piece was made by scratching the design into a sheet of acetate (used for overhead projectors). The mountains and hills were created with little bits of torn masking tape; this is the collagraph aspect of the print. Mary dabbed the ink onto the plate with the edge of a piece of mat board, overlapping some of the colours, and rubbed the ink into the scratches and tape using yellow pages from the phone book. She then wiped most of the ink off and used a printmaking press to print the image onto a piece of damp rag paper.
“Terra Fortis” is part of a travelling exhibit, “Our Home and Native Land” and is featured in our DōnaBōna card by that name, along with ten other prints by Canadian artists.
Mary created a version of this image which was juried into the International Mini-print Show of Cadaqués 2017 in Barcelona, Spain (miniprint.org). The exhibit will travel to France and England, close to the place where Mary grew up. The heart of Mary’s art is going back whence she came, as the beauty of Canada is shared with the world through her printmaking.