FAIRBANKS, Alaska (AP) - Local Fairbanks artist and printmaker Sara Tabbert was not an artistic kid, she said. But one wouldn’t guess that by taking a look around her 20-by-20-foot cabin studio tucked away in the black spruce forests of Goldstream Valley. Painted wood panels and framed prints line the walls, two print presses wait ready for new material and a work table coated in wood carving tools stands to one side of the room.
“I was not the typical story of the kid who always did art,” Tabbert said with a laugh. “I played violin and was pretty involved with that, and then, about half way through college, I kind of hit a point where I didn’t like what I was doing.”
In the midst of change with a hint of indecision, Tabbert returned to Fairbanks where her passion for printmaking sprang to life after an unexpected drawing class at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
“I was not particularly good at it, but it was the most interesting and the most challenging thing I’d ever done,” she said. “I ran into printmaking fairly soon after that and when I went back to the college I was attending, I fairly quickly fell into the print shop.”
Tabbert said she was immediately drawn to the process of printmaking.
“I also feel that with printmaking there’s that element of surprise where you’re doing something to this thing,” she said, gesturing to a wood block. “And then you print it, and this is your piece of work - and until you go through that process of running the print, you’re never sure; sometimes it’s a really great surprise.”
Many of her prints depict micro views of nature, often at a point of transition.
“I’m really interested at looking closely and looking carefully,” Tabbert said. “I think a lot of things I also am looking at are things where the natural world is working on itself. The peeled bark, the piece of wood that’s in a lake and decaying, the alder that’s infested with fungus. There’s something about that transition or transformation of one thing or another.”
Tabbert was born and raised in Fairbanks but left to attend college and to begin her career as an artist before returning to her home town in 2000.
Since then she’s made a name for herself as a locally renowned printmaker, but only in the past few years has she expanded her practice to include actual wood pieces.
For Tabbert, while she’s not a huge fan of painting, her carved and painted wood panels are more akin to print making.
“I would definitely still call myself a print maker, in that all of the work that I do has kind of grown out of that,” she said. “I’ve been doing a lot more work lately that has to do just with wood rather than printing on paper … relief carved pieces. They look a lot like a block print. Same style, same carving tools, a lot of the technique is the same. People really respond to the texture and the tactile quality of that.”
The process begins similarly to how a print would be born; a carved wood block. But instead of coating in ink before running through the press with a sheet of paper, Tabbert paints the wood directly. The result is a vibrant, multidimensional piece with intriguing texture as if the tree bark depicted in the painting were coming to life.
“I am not a painter. If you give me a paint brush and a blank canvas, it will be a disaster,” Tabbert said with a laugh. “But there was something about it, that is enough like a print at least in having an element of graphic structure where I seem to be able to figure it out.”
But with the arts falling prey to Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s collection of more than $444 million in operating budget vetoes, Tabbert sees the interconnection of Alaska’s art world under more threat than she can remember.
“I’m really worried,” Tabbert said. “I came back here, I won’t say on a whim, but I definitely came back to Fairbanks to give it a try and see if I can make a career as an artist in Fairbanks, and it’s exceeded my expectations. I am concerned both with the hit on the university and the Alaska State Council on the Arts, those are the two things that I looked at when I came back. I thought those were two good indications that this is a state that takes the arts seriously.”
For now, Tabbert said she will continue to create art and support her fellow artists in the hopes that those who pull the purse strings for the state of Alaska will recognize the importance of the arts and restore vital funding for organizations, museums and communities as a whole.
“There’s a lot that we have yet to see,” Tabbert said, hopeful. “But I would hate to have to advise the next generation of artists that maybe this isn’t the right place.”
Ultimately, for Tabbert, the draw to art revolves around the ability to communicate through imagery.
“I am somewhat of a reserved person. I’m not someone who’s particularly effusive or outgoing,” Tabbert said. “But I think my visual work is a way that I can talk to people. This is another avenue of communication and I can point people in the direction of things I think are interesting or important, and it’s also a way to open up a conversation or a dialogue.”
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Information from: Fairbanks (Alaska) Daily News-Miner, http://www.newsminer.com
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