‘A Year of Printmaking’ at

Year of Printmaking’ at

Middle Street Gallery exhibit

From last winter’s snows to the mist and fog of this summer’s record rainfall, Madison printmaker Tucker Hill records the changing landscape of the Piedmont region in a new show of his unique black and white monotypes at The Middle Street Gallery in Little Washington.

“A Year of Printmaking” runs from Oct. 31 to Nov. 30 with an artist’s reception at the gallery on Sunday, Nov. 2 from 2 to 5 p.m.

Hill began printing monotypes 18 years ago in a studio in Richmond, traveling first to the counties just west of Richmond to make sketches and take study photographs of the landscape for his prints and finally finding his way to the Blue Ridge and the counties of Rappahannock, Madison, Greene and Albemarle.

In the mid-1990s, he moved to northern Madison County at the foot of Old Rag Mountain where much of his printmaking subjects may be found.

Abandoning color for the interesting composition challenges of black and white, Hill’s oil color on paper prints rely on the soft contrasts of light and dark to convey a scene. They have a photographic realism although the images are the result of freehand painting on a print plate which is then transferred to paper using an etching press. The result is a single image which cannot be duplicated.

Hill’s monotypes have been selected for numerous juried shows in the mid-Atlantic region, including the annual “Art on Paper” Exhibition at the Maryland Federation of Art’s Gallery on the Circle, Annapolis and the biennial Irene Leache Memorial Exhibition at The Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Va. Twenty-nine of Hill’s prints have completed a two-year state tour through the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ Statewide Traveling Arts Program.

The Middle Street Gallery is an artist-run, non-profit gallery, located next to The Inn at Little Washington in. and is open from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Friday through Sunday, year round. For more information, call (540) 923-4024.