She recalls no memory of not loving art.
“I was just one of those weird kids,” Denise Presnell, artist from Sheboygan, said. “Everyone starts out being an artist; singing, dancing, etc. When you’re a kid, you do all of that stuff. It sticks with some of us.”
Presnell, whose works are currently on display as part of Carnelian Art Gallery’s “Finding Color In the Chaos” exhibition, invited me to her home earlier this week to tell me about her comeuppance as an artist, and to show me how she achieves her distinguished artistic style.
All of her pieces, those adorning the gallery and the interior of her home, have a rich indigo background and are interlaced with bright oranges, yellows, greens, and other colors Presnell said are reminiscent of Indian and Arabian garments with their intricate and vibrant patterns.
The artist grew up in south central Nebraska in a town of about 900 people. During that time, Presnell recalled seeing her older sister as a role model, copying everything she would do “right and left.” Her sister is also an artist.
The University of Nebraska is Presnell’s undergrad alma mater. That’s where she studied printmaking, having graduated in 1981. Presnell later decided to go to graduate school for painting at The Pennsylvania State University, where she graduated in 1985.
She eventually went on to teach art at various universities throughout the United States, including in Pennsylvania, Kansas, Louisiana and Wisconsin.
“I taught just about everything,” Presnell said, adding that art history was part of that mix.
Meanwhile, Presnell’s artistic style evolved from formulaic to abstract.
“For years and years, I worked representational,” she said. “I did figurative work and then also started doing more landscape. Texture never left my work and so the landscapes would look more abstract that representative. I have always wanted to work abstractly. When I officially retired from teaching, I went full-blown abstract.
“I started out with just acrylics. Then I met a woman in Eau Claire who was a cold wax queen. Everyone in the country and beyond knows who she is. I started to learn about the cold wax process. It was a chance to harken back to my printmaking days; etching and talio (intalgio printmaking, a process where images are created by incising lines or areas into a plate, and ink is applied to the recessed areas to create a print) and scraping into plates … digging into the surface beneath it. That became a surprise technique for me. I started to do more gestural dipping (a technique where paint is applied to a surface with free-flowing strokes) … using flood paints to create gestural lines and carrying that on into the cold wax.”
Color has always been really important in Presnell’s work.
“It’s always been a main source of expression,” she said.
But how does Presnell make her signature indigo artworks?
“I start working with the color, and I use a brush for that,” she told me during our Tuesday visit. “A lot of people using cold wax don’t use brushes. It kind wrecks ’em. I always painted with brushes when I was learning to paint and I like wet to wet so that you can get those really subtle changes in the tone or the value.
“I put this darker tone, which you see in all the paintings … it gives me sort of a neutral ground to work with. It’s a space. It’s water. It’s ambiguous. It kind of gives me more to play with in terms of whether I’m working with something that looks like a figure that develops out of the painting. You’ll see a lot of dots. That’s the next thing that I’ll do to this.”
Presnell then used a solvent to create specks, subsequently scraping off some of the blue paint, revealing the color underneath. After that, Presnell peels off the cold wax she poured on the painting before adding the blue. The cold wax is her guideline for the abstract forms that eventually manifest.
“I never know what direction its going to go in, but that’s kind of the fun of it,” Presnell said.
