Written By Donna Engle
When Shawn Lockhart picks up a gouge in her Union Bridge studio and begins to carve art out of a block, the result is likely to be a print filled with symbolism and suffused with the artist’s imagination.
In one print, for example, two nearly identical trees, stand trunk to trunk, white on black and black on white in a style reminiscent of M.C. Escher’s symmetrical drawings. In another print, a woman, half-hidden, extends her hands with palms open to reveal a heart nestled in each palm.
When Melinda Byrd confronts a block, gouge in hand, the resulting print is likely to reflect her lifelong ties to nature.
In one print, a brook trout sparkles in color as he swims. Another print features the hops that grow beside the deck at the Woodbine home she shares with her husband John, Chief of Parks for Howard County. Dogs are a favorite subject, and Hooper, her black Labrador retriever, has been the model for several paintings and a relief print in which three dogs with legs intertwined in a Gaelic knot appear to chase each other around a fourth, sleeping dog.
Lockhart and Byrd are relief print artists, working in a medium that has a 1,300-year history. In 8th century Japan, Buddhist scholars carved sacred images into wooden blocks, inked the blocks and pressed paper against them. The technique requires the artist to think in reverse of painting. In a painting, the canvas becomes colored wherever an artist touches her brush. In woodblock printing, lines cut into the wood will appear in white and untouched areas in the color of the ink. Woodblock prints can be hand colored or made with the difficult technique of using different color blocks.
Today, block prints are often made from linocuts, designs cut into linoleum mounted on a wooden block rather than directly in the wood. Linoleum is softer and easier to carve than wood, reducing the risk of carpal tunnel syndrome, not to mention cut fingers.
Lockhart works almost exclusively in block printing, making prints, note cards, blank journals with prints on the front covers and handmade books. Byrd’s work ranges from block prints to floorcloths, sketches and murals to hand painted glassware and oil painting, a recent passion. Lockhart has been a block printer for more than 35 years. Byrd was one of her students, and has been relief printing for eight years.
Lockhart’s life journey began in upstate New York, where her great-grandmother, who felt the tug of Ireland, filled the little girl’s imagination with stories of County Clare. A shy, introspective child, devoutly Catholic, Lockhart prayed for visions and saw her future as a nun.
But she was also an artist. When she was about seven years old, she won a television set. What would she trade it for if she could have anything she wanted? her father asked. “A box of paints,” she said, and he bought her a set of watercolors.
Lockhart enrolled at the University of Maryland, but transferred to the Maryland College of Art and Design, where she connected with a woodblock print instructor whose art was filled with symbolism. She graduated in 1975. She married in 1977.
Lockhart, her husband and their two sons settled in Montgomery County, where she produced art for outdoor arts fairs and exhibits. Her work is intensely personal, and she immerses herself in the creative process from the moment it takes shape as an idea to making the frame for the print.
“I like being part of the whole process from conception of the image to the drawing of it to printing. And when you pull off the proof, at times it brings me to tears because you can’t really tell what it will look like until you take it off,” she said. “It’s a magic thing when I pull that proof off. I’ve rubbed it into being,” she added.
Lockhart explained that a proof shows the artist whether there are any areas of the block that need to be cleaned out or altered with the gouge. Its quality also depends on whether the block was inked properly and the pressure involved in rubbing, which can make prints too light, too dark, uneven or, if there is movement of paper or block, a double-print.
Lockhart makes prints with many fine lines, more difficult to carve than prints with fewer, bolder lines. It is painstaking work, because a mistake in a cut is very difficult to fix. As for the ancient Japanese woodblock print masters, “I am in awe of them,” she said. She tried their technique of making prints with multiple blocks for different colors, but prefers to work in black and white.
The family moved to Carroll County in 1989, where Lockhart continued her art. In 1995, when her marriage was breaking up, she went to County Clare to sort out her life, and although she was seeing it for the first time, it felt like home. She took long walks in the western area of the county where the Atlantic Ocean crashes against steep cliffs and sandy bays, and fell in love with the land, and especially the sea.
An old dream of a child named Mara, a word that means “the sea” in Gaelic, and her own middle name, Maris, which means “the sea” in Latin, led Lockhart to name her online gallery Tonn na Mhara, wave of the sea.
Each year, she returned to Ireland, in 2002 stretching her stay out to 16 months, until a change in immigration laws compelled her to return to the U.S.
When an opportunity arose to assist with group tours to Ireland for a local travel agency, she jumped at it. It makes her trips “home” affordable and she gets to introduce others to the country she loves.
There have been times when the well of her inspiration seemed to have run dry, but when Lockhart let go of trying to find ideas, they came to her. At times, she draws with her eyes closed, in her non-dominant hand, to allow designs to emerge from beyond her usual perspective.
What Lockhart prints is drawn from the deep spirituality and romanticism of her character.
“My art is so deeply personal that whenever I do a show, I feel like my soul is hanging naked on the wall,” she said.
Like Lockhart, Byrd was strongly influenced in childhood by a grandparent. She grew up in Massachusetts and formed a special bond with her grandfather, an inventor of weaving machinery who shared her interest in nature.
“He would pick up a bumblebee on his finger and let it crawl onto my finger,” she recalled. “He was the first person I ever knew who had a sketchbook,” she added. Her childhood artwork did not go on grandpa’s refrigerator. He framed it.
Byrd’s career paths have been nature and art. After graduating from Keene State College, New Hampshire, in 1977 with a major in biology, she went to work for her grandparents as a Scandinavian rya rug designer but seized a chance to go to California to do mountain and ice climbing with friends.
The trip west led her to Colorado State Forest, where she was hired as an artist for a three-week project. That first project led to two consecutive summers in the parks, where she met her husband. They married in 1982 and moved to Maryland, his native state.
Byrd worked for 20 years in nature interpretation and environmental education. In 1999, her job as manager of Hashawha Environmental Center and Bear Branch Nature Center had become largely administrative. She began thinking about what she might do if she began to create art again.
Her ideas flowed best when she observed crows. She carved her first woodcut depicting a crow, a woman, and a turtle posed with bodies nearly merged.
“Birds have always been a significant part of my life. I feel they have something to tell me,” she said. A crow became the logo for her studio, named Byrdcall as a play on words and a tribute to her affinity with birds.
John Byrd built his wife a studio behind the house, a light, airy building that has the feel of openness to nature. Melinda makes limited edition prints, and when the edition is complete, impresses the designs on T-shirts to sell as wearable art. She teaches art classes, where her students learn “green” practices such as recycling and using a soy-based cleaner rather than petroleum products and harsh chemicals to clean up after printing.
Byrd cannot precisely trace the source of her ideas. “The designs just come, I can’t really say where from, I’m just playing around. If I think, it ruins it,” she said. She said her best art emerges when she is not consciously thinking about creating, but in a meditative state where her right brain can take over.
