Arts and Culture

Text, paint and UV light come together in this Kelowna artist's work

New art gallery exhibition features local screen printer

  • Uses ultra-violet cured ink
  • README will be on view from Jan. 29 to April 17
  • Briar Craig is an artist and UBCO professor

A quirky professor and the curiosity of an unknown medium is what inspired a local artist to begin printmaking nearly 40 years ago.

Briar Craig incorporates layers of text and uses clever wordplay in his intricate screen prints to create new meanings out of common words, phrases, and letters. He is also a professor of Printmaking, Photography, and Drawing at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. His work has been displayed in over twenty-five solo and hundreds of group exhibitions around the world.

“I had a teacher named Carl Heywood at Queen’s University in the 1980s… he was a printmaker,” Craig told Kelowna10. “He was such a quirky, strange, unbelievably talented fellow, that I instantly wanted to be like him.”

Craig said he drew and painted in high school, but it wasn’t until he reached university that he was introduced to printmaking. He didn’t know much about the medium or how it could be used as a fine art, so he wanted to learn more and soon became hooked.

“Suddenly all of these things and building imagery up through layers the way you do, especially in screen printing, just made sense,” he said.

Craig uses a special kind of ink for his screenprints that only dries when exposed to ultra-violet light in a specialized machine. Since the ink doesn’t dry from the air, it allows him to create rich depth and detail within his prints.

His studio space at UBCO is buzzing with students working on their own prints. There were works of art around the room, giving a sense of curiosity and artistic freedom of expression.

When Craig first started screen printing, he tried to make images that were funny or unique. Now, he is inspired by text to create his art as a social commentary about the world we live in.

“We’re also bombarded by information all the time and I kind of want my prints to fit into that realm of media bombardment,” he explained.

For the next few months, his work will be in a solo exhibition titled README, which opens at the Kelowna Art Gallery on Jan. 29. It is a variety of images taken from the gallery’s permanent collection of Craig’s work.

He had a previous solo show at the gallery in the early 2000s, titled Emerda, which is read me scrambled. He said there is some symmetry in the two exhibitions as they share the same name.

README will be on view from Jan. 29 to April 17, 2022.

Published 2022-01-27 by Jordan Brenda

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