Brigitte Potter-Mael Festuca Idahoensis Elmer

Brigitte lives and works in Canada since 1977. Her academic training included printmaking, drawing, papermaking and multi-media art at Concordia University, Montreal (BFA 1983). Living on Canada’s West Coast since 1990, she has been an active member of the Malaspina Printmakers Society in Vancouver since then, where she created works in stone lithography and from wooden matrices. As lithography stones were getting too heavy for Brigitte to work on in recent years, she began to experiment with wooden plates. Aiming to find an image-making process that would allow for a painterly as well as a graphic image that one may associate with lithography, etching or intaglio, she developed her own technique on lightweight Baltic Birch plywood.

Much trial and error and a whole lot of frustration has led to a satisfying technique that she now calls her woodcut-intaglio. In this process, the plate is first prepared with water-based media that dries to a solid surface. This allows her to create a painterly ground with brushwork and textures. Once dry, she engraves and cuts into the plate (much like a woodcut) to get a detailed graphic image. The plate is then inked with oil-based inks and carefully wiped off again, much like in an intaglio or etching. Using an etching press with thick felt blankets to push the paper-fibre into all the matrix’s detailed carvings and textures, the plate is printed onto water-soaked high-grade 300gms Hahnemuhle copperplate paper.

Much of Brigitte’s work has been shown in solo- and group-exhibitions in Canada and abroad. She has been a recipient of various grants and stipends from Canada Council for the Arts Ottawa, Ministry of cultural Affairs Quebec, Banff Centre for the Arts, the Goethe Institute Vancouver, the Kulturamt Dresden, Rosa Luxemburg Institute, Berlin, Pinacoteca Vitulano, Italy, and Altos de Chavon Artist Colony, Dominican Republic.