Catherine Kernan

Catherine Kernan is an American printmaker and painter based in the Boston area whose practice operates at the boundary between woodcut and painting. She is co-founder and partner of Mixit Print Studio, a professional open-access printmaking workshop in Somerville, Massachusetts, established in 1987 and one of the most prominent independent print studios in New England.

Kernan received an MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and has been an exhibiting printmaker for more than four decades. She co-founded Mixit Print Studio with Jane Goldman in 1987 as a direct outgrowth of Artist's Proof Studio, an earlier printmaking cooperative in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the partnership expanded in 2010 with the addition of Randy Garber. Mixit operates as a working studio for its partners and as a teaching and editioning facility for the wider Boston print community.

Her studio practice is dedicated to large-format woodcut, drypoint, and monotype, worked with non-toxic Akua inks. The signature aspect of her practice is that she rarely prints directly from a block to paper — instead, she inks multiple large-scale woodblocks and offsets them onto polycarbonate plates, then transfers from the polycarbonate to paper. The combination of multi-block offset printing, viscosity rolling in different ink densities, and never inking the same way twice produces what she terms 'singular prints' — works that are technically prints but are unique impressions in the manner of monotypes. The result is a body of woodcut-monoprint hybrids on the scale of paintings.

The sustained organising principle of her work is a sequence of named series, each of which extends a single visual idea across many large-format sheets. Her series — the principal organising taxonomy of her own catalogue site — include Afterimages, Against the Grain, Arching the Stream, At the Whim of Currents, Breathing Space, Circling the Center, Curvature, Echo Location, Elegy, Lyric Fragments, Marking Time, Navigation, Overlay, Quotation, Soundings, Staccato, Surface to Surface, Threshold, Time and Again, and Tracings. The titles foreground sound, currents, breathing, and the rhythms of attention as the conceptual framework for her abstract mark-making.

Kernan has held teaching positions at colleges, art schools, and museums for more than twenty-five years and has led printmaking workshops across the United States. She is represented by Soprafina Gallery in Boston and Jason McCoy Gallery in New York, and her work is held in numerous American institutional collections. She is also profiled by Making Art Safely as one of the prominent Akua-ink studio practitioners in the United States.

Within contemporary American printmaking she is one of the leading practitioners of large-format woodcut as painting, and — through her partnership in Mixit Print Studio and her decades of teaching — one of the most influential figures in the New England print community.