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Marie Schoeff’s work ranges from mural-size to postcard-size drawings, paintings and prints. Always at the heart of her process is the practice of drawing. She likens the hand drawn-mark to the primacy of one’s individual voice. In her current drawings and prints she is undertaking an extensive search into the drawn line as a trace. She understands marks are a vestige of being, evidence of what her eyes bear witness to, within the passage of time. Joining the action of her hand with her visual scrutiny results in a contemplative process that extracts the work from a deep place of personal meaning.

 

The whole of the natural world provides a studio for Marie. As if held a visual captive by the movement of grasses; the flight and voices of birds; veins in a gigantic boulder; or light reflections on blossoms, Marie sits still and finds those places where nature, the hand-drawn mark, and the individual voice converge.

 

Her printing process is direct. While making her dry point plates, often on location outdoors, Marie can be found at the long end of an extension cord that powers her etching tool, a soldering iron. She remains focused with intense observation — melting lines into the plexiglass. Etched and unetched plates are inked, positioned on the press, printed and considered. Plates are re-inked, re-positioned, re-printed and considered again. The process continues until all is right in the eyes of the artist. The nuances of the etched lines, inking methods, and juxtapositions of shape, line and color result in multi-layered, dynamic monotypes. She speaks of these printed marks as amplifications of their primary source, the act of drawing.

 

Marie’s use of color is rooted in a personal symbology, and is used to evoke a sense of light, atmosphere and the natural world. Colors are mixed with intention to suggest a memory or to reference life in the natural world. The artist’s linear marks are primarily unrecognizable but fall in that space between the familiar and the unfamiliar — un-namable, yet suggestive and reminiscent — slowing the viewer down to move in time with the artist’s own unhurried process of mindful observation.

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