MAGGY ASTON
Place of Residence: Greensboro, PA

These recent prints involve connections between art, science, nature, and technology. Much of my work is drawn from observation, though I also use images from the history of science and art as literary or symbolic references. Working mostly with plant and animal forms, I try to approach my subject in the manner of a naturalist, through research, reading, drawing, and fieldwork, which includes wanderings in woods or along shorelines in search of interesting forms and phenomena. The drawing studies often follow the conventions of scientific illustration, where full chiaroscuro renderings are juxtaposed with schematic diagrams, cross-sections, and detailed enlargements. Sooner or later, however, scientific objectivity is abandoned in the interest of art-making, and the image is transformed or abstracted.

Most of my prints end up as mixed-media monotypes combining drawing, painting, and printmaking. I use a wide range of non-toxic print processes including relief, engraving, stencil, transfer, and color-viscosity. Matrices are interchangeable, and images move from print to print. Drawings, paintings, and monotype surfaces are layered with multiple printings performed at intervals over a period of months or years. The act of erasure and reprinting, and the residual images produced by many changes attempt to create a passage through the time and space of the picture which suggests the ephemeral quality of natural forms. Vaporous states, transitions from solid to liquid, and the accumulation and dispersion of particles are impressions I try to convey through manipulations of the printed surface.

Biography

Maggy Aston earned her B.F.A. from Maryland Institute and her M.F.A. in printmaking from West Virginia University in 1995. She currently lives on the banks of the Monongahela River in a small rural town south of Pittsburgh, PA. There she maintains a studio/printshop, garden, and an antiquarian bookshop which she operates with her husband and daughter. Aston teaches drawing and design at the California University of Pennsylvania, California, PA.

Aston's work can be found online at www.absolutearts.com/portfolios/a/aston and also in the flat-files of the Digging Pitt Gallery, Pittsburgh, PA, a gallery opened by New York City artist John Morris. An exhibition of her painted monotypes was on view at the Digging Pitt Gallery in October of 2005.