These galleries contain artwork done over an entire career, from the early 1970s to the present, with an emphasis on recent work.
Gallery
Galleries
Collagraphs
After a brief introduction to etching Evan Summer began making collagraphs. He began mostly by chance. He wanted to make an embossed print from a deeply etched zinc plate. Harvey Breverman, the printmaking professor at SUNY Buffalo, suggested that a plate made of matboard would be both cheaper and easier. This led to experimentation with the collagraph throughout Evan’s undergraduate and graduate studies. It also led to collages, constructed like collagraph plates with the addition of graphite, pastel and acrylic.
Collagraph plates are constructed like collages, usually made of matboard, paper, fabric and other materials. The plates are coated with varnish or acrylic medium to make them impervious to the oil based inks and solvents used in printing and cleaning. They are hand printed on an etching press, usually with intaglio inking.
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Etchings
Evan Summer has been making etchings for 40 years. Most of these deal with architectural and geometric forms in landscape. Other subjects include images from nature.
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Insect Photographs
Albrecht Durer drew a stag beetle in 1505. It was rendered with obvious fascination, keen observation and meticulous care. I believe I have been attracted to beetles, especially large beetles, for the same reasons as Durer and many other artists – their beauty, as well as the diversity of colors, textures, patterns and forms in these insects. Other insects like butterflies are beautiful too. But large beetles look threatening, and I was uncomfortable even picking up a preserved specimen. A rhinoceros beetle with an eight-inch wingspan is intimidating dead or alive. Charles Darwin remarked that if this type of beetle were enlarged to the size of a horse or even a dog “with its polished bronze coat of mail and its vast complex of horns…it would be one of the most imposing animals in the world.” So, for me they’re simultaneously beautiful, menacing and ugly, an aesthetic much more complex and interesting than just being beautiful.
