A Very Pleasant And Inspirational Surprise

A couple of weeks ago, Norman Strike was gallery sitting when a young woman came in with a bundle under her arms. As she unwrapped ti, it was revealed that they were two metal plates used for printmaking. Since we are a printmaking gallery, she felt she was at the right place to inquire about the material of the plates and the artist.

Luckily for her, Norman looked at the plates and they seemed very familiar to him. He took photos of the plates and sent to me. I also decided that they belonged to a former member of the gallery, Heloisa Tigre.

The way the young lady came across these plates is another amazing story. She read a list serve offering free bricks in North West Washington in upper Georgetown on T Street. She was designing a garden at her new home and wanted bricks to outline the flower beds. She came upon a huge pile of dirt, the site of a basement excavation. As she was digging for the bricks she was puzzled by sharp, square pieces of metal sticking out of the ground and pulled them out of the dirt. At the end, she had 10 plates in front of her that were caked in mud but strangely beautiful and consequently brought them to our attention.

Heloisa was a Brazilian artist married to a gentleman who either worked at the World Bank or in the diplomatic corp. Her work reflected her richly colored background of South Brazil. Her images were largely of children, architecture and fairytales. She worked mostly in her basement next to the washing machine but did her larger work at the Printmaker’s Studio in Bethesda where Ann Zahn presided over an international group of printmakers. We formed a strong bond, exchanged ideas and also talked about our personal lives. Heloisa’s marriage had cracks and she may have separated eventually. One of the reasons was her husband’s lack of support for her art among other things. Tragically she died in 2006 of cancer and the family must have sold the house to the people who were remodeling the basement. I can only assume that the plates were left behind in a corner of the basement and forgotten.

I took two of the damaged plates to my studio, cleaned them up as well as I could and inked them up with black ink. Her lines were very deep, almost embossed with many detailed textures among the strong shapes. I was channeling Heloisa and heard her deep, melodic voice urging me on to print her plates. When I pulled the print off the press, I was astounded how well preserved the plates actually still were and I was also astounded by the beauty of the prints.

The print of a woman shopping with her family in possibly Georgetown showed the woman apart from the rest of the family and all their eyes were empty. It made me ponder why she was separated from them? The other plate was of young Amazon riders on horses galloping in a corn field, free and strong, their expressions triumphant. I only inked the plates in black but came across my collection of her prints and marveled at her luminous and spicy colors.

I searched the internet for Heloisa Tigre and came across at artist site that sold her beautiful prints for $20! It was set up as a legacy site by her family. This really made me ponder, what happens to our artwork after we are gone? How will our family dispose of them? As a printmaker, we don’t just make one piece of art, we make an edition so we have several copies of a work. Will they all be recycled at the curbside, donated to thrift shops, or end up , if we are lucky, in a drawer in a museum or donated to our alma mater? Or may one day a young woman will pull our plates out of the dirt and hand them over to someone to revive our spirit.

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