Narrative and making meaning have been at the center of all my artwork. This not only reflects my interest in this kind of representing through artmaking but also my previous work as an English professor. My fascination with printmaking is personal: as the son and grandson of printers, I feel that printmaking allows me to pay tribute to the craft my father and grandfather practiced; I am drawn to making art that is repeatable and historically tied to images in books, political posters, etc. The most compelling reason is the process it always experimental and holds an element of surprise.

My way of working is in series--producing prints that are thematically and technically related. Each series is informed by some theme and bits of poetry and combining new techniques. In many works, I combine drypoint and monoprint techniques. Newer works are screenprints, which allows for both graphic and painterly elements and the making screens that use text and/or photos.            

My MFA is from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Further study includes Penland School of Art (North Carolina), Zea Mays Printmaking (Florence, MA), Fine Arts Work Center (Provincetown, MA), Provincetown Art Association and Museum (Provincetown, MA).

I had an Artist Residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig, Newbliss, County Monaghan, Ireland in the summer of 2009; was Artist in Residence, Cambridge University, Homerton College, Cambridge, England in printmaking and bookmaking 1998. I taught at Art New England for two summers, 2001 and 2002.

I have been in many group shows including: Arts New England Faculty Show at the Plum Gallery in Williamstown, MA; Castle Hill Center for the Arts, Truro, MA, Provincetown Art Association and Museum, I have participated in members’ shows. Solo exhibits include: Cambridge University, Homerton College, the Monroe C. Gutman Library at Harvard University the Wellfleet Public Library Gallery in Wellfleet.

As a part of my work as an associate professor at Lesley University, I started established two galleries of which I was Director/Curator: the Marran Gallery, from 2001-2011 and the Atrium Gallery, Lesley University from 2007-2013, which both exhibited work of students, faculty, community artists.

Off Main Gallery Exhibition:
Fingerprints of Memory: A Retrospective
July 28 - August 17, 2022

Mark Brennan is an artist based in Wellfleet and Brooklyn, NY. He has been showing work in Cape Cod galleries since 2010 and at Off Main since 2018. In 2020, his site-specific installation Edge of the Continent/Center of the World featured a 69-foot watercolor painting that ran the entire length of the gallery’s three rooms in its previous location in a repurposed 1870 barn. This year, he extends that model with Inside Out, another full-gallery installation that stretches the boundaries of a conventional art show. On June 17-18, he will be creating the work in situ, and on July 6, he will erase it altogether. In addition to these ambitious but temporary projects, he paints carefully articulated renderings of things that appear small and insignificant until purposely observed, often framed in his own artist-made boxes.

Off Main Gallery Exhibition, Inside Out
June 17th - July 6th, 2022

markbrennan.us
instagram: @markbrennanart

My interest in printmaking grew out of a long-standing fascination with the expressionist woodcuts of the Brücke and Blaue Reiter groups active in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. I began as a printmaker carving woodblocks and printing them and eventually moved on to include the many intaglio, relief, and monotype methods available to the contemporary printmaker.

My original training was not as a graphic artist, but as a musician and as a linguist. As such, I became accustomed to thinking abstractly. I am attracted to simple forms, and making abstract images on plates is a pleasing way of thinking for me. The challenge of trying to achieve in non-representational art the aesthetic clarity that is found in music is a constant, informing my efforts as a printmaker.

Off Main Gallery Exhibition:
July 7, 2022 - July 27, 2022

hanniwoodbury.com

Philip C. Hart was a Philosophy major at Haverford College and later studied Architecture at the Boston Architectural College. He worked for firms in Boston before moving to Maine in 1986. In Maine, his focus was on designing public schools until he retired in 2010. Since that time, he has engaged in a process of discovery through the medium of mobiles.

His work is based in an exploration of pattern recognition, which is fundamental to language, intelligence, and memory. The composition of his mobiles is based on form, order, and balance. He is concerned with the fragility, malleability, and resilience of consciousness. In the vocabulary of this work, motion is as much a subject of it as is its composition.

His mobiles are constructed with simple materials: wire, sheet metal, and fishing line.

Philip C. Hart lives with his wife Susan in Philadelphia, PA.

Off Main Gallery Exhibition:
July 7, 2022 - July 27, 2022

www.philiph.art

Instagram: @philipchart