Lauren Evans creates high-contrast prints from home

Lauren Evans creates high-contrast prints from home

Joshua Boulet, Features and Entertainment Editor

The Indie Craft Parade continues this year as a weekend shop to keep its customers safe. It may have lost some of the grandeur of a parade, but artists are still making art and the shop continues to support them.

Lauren Evans makes art using relief printmaking out of her home in South Carolina. She carves a design into a sheet of linoleum, then that design is transferred onto paper with ink, somewhat similar to how a stamp works. This process shapes the style of the piece and creates black and white art with intense contrast.

“I always liked sketching and painting, but none of it spoke to me,” she said.

Evans attended school at Berry college and majored in art and psychology. The school offered a class about relief printmaking and everything clicked when she took it. In a way, it proved that she could create art outside of painting or drawing. The stark contrast and the minimalist aesthetic sparked her creative spirit.

Relief printmaking was popularized during expressionism with artist such as Van Gogh, Munch, Picasso and many others. However the principles have been used since around 500 BC. The most notable trend of relief printmaking came from German expressionism and anti-war sentiments from before World War 1.

The style of these artists and relief printmaking as a whole lead her to continue working with it long after that class. No art comes without a price and this is especially true for relief printmaking; she realized that she would have to start selling her work to not go bankrupt buying supplies.

She named her work “Studio 37,” which was based off her softball number from her childhood and her initials flipped. She started with stands at farmer’s markets selling postcards and the like. Farmer’s markets weren’t the ideal location for art, but the entry fee is relatively small.

Much of her early work was focused on flowers and symbolism. For her, art and emotion are tied closely, and people have been enamored with the language of flowers for years. She also is interested in greeting cards; she looks at what people want to communicate and builds that into her work.

Psychology remains her focus, but she would love to continue learning techniques and making more art. This is her first year participating at the Indie Craft Parade and she still works from her home on her projects. In the future, she hopes for a bigger studio space and to be able to teach other people about the art she enjoys so much.

You can buy her work at the Indie Craft Parade this year and see more of her work on her website.