Weekend Portfolio: Evie McKenna
Images and Text by Evie McKenna
The botanical world is a fun house for me artistically. The more I work with plants, flowers, trees and the landscape in general, the more capacity I find to make spaces in my work filled with emotion, beauty and magic. The attraction is endless. The works seen here involve a progression from some years as a photographer using a camera and making photograph prints primarily. As this process became more mechanical and automated, I felt the need for something more tactile than the surface of printing papers. I began to draw on the outtakes from my printing sessions. I came across some photographs I had made years earlier where I had scratched the surface making playful, cartoonish doodles. The surface was active and textured though and I borrowed from this technique but used more control in the response along with pastels.
A goal was to keep the photographic part and add layers that would add texture, pattern and line beyond the image. My color skills and a dormant love of art supplies reemerged. I started with single colors and grids which morphed into a mixed media response with pastels, gouache, inks and pencil. The marks became individual responses to each image. The palette was personal and in some ways was a response to colors that I couldn't make well in photography like strong oranges and reds, pastels and neon yellows. The fusing of photographs with drawings became my new method of working while the botanical world remained a constant. The use of archival photo paper, which is similar in weight and texture to watercolor paper, was an incentive to use wet mediums too. I feel that this process of physically working with photographs that are illuminated and excavated creates a vague but pleasant sensation.
To view Evie McKenna’s website, click here.
ⒸEvie McKenna/ Popsicle Park, 2021, 12” x 34”, painted photograph, pastels, gouache, graphite, ink and etching
on archival paper
