Screenprinting with Beverly Acha

Beverly Acha’s paintings build a distinct visual language and logic in response to the environment in which they are made, so it only felt right to invite our community into her creative process with an artmaking workshop at the Museum of Contemporary of Art, North Miami (MOCA). On May 30 we spent a Saturday afternoon with Beverly, master printmaker Beatriz Rodriguez and Commissioner members learning how to make our very own screenprints. Then we gathered in the museum’s courtyard alongside Jack Pierson’s sculpture “Paradise” for the artwork reveal, where Collector-level members received their third piece of the season.

Titled farito y mareas (la memoria) or Lighthouse and tides (memory), scroll below to learn more about Beverly’s artwork. Photography from the event is by Andrea Lorena @fujifilmgirl.

From Beverly Acha, about the work:

farito y mareas (la memoria) is a three-color screenprint created in response to the landscapes of two places I have lived in over the last year. Miami, FL and Fishers Island, NY have offered me intimate connections to the ocean, its movements and endlessly shifting color. The entire edition was hand printed by master printer John Andrews at The Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in New York City.

I often work in series, allowing ideas to develop across multiple paintings, drawings, or prints. farito y mareas (la memoria) is based on the composition of a large painting I had been working during my residency at Lighthouse Works. In this painting, I was struggling to resolve the composition, which was structured by two flowing curves descending from the tops of two vertical lines. My drawings for the print emphasized the movement of light spinning in space and the shifting environment around a lighthouse.

Lighthouses are literal beacons of light that steadily shine across the ocean 24 hours a day in a constantly changing environment. The image became an abstract representation of the movement of light spinning through the atmosphere (mist, fog, darkness, wind, rain etc) and the ocean’s tides—a wavy shifting surface.

Repetition in my work is a way of indicating transitions, while color points to time of day, and also functions as a way to tap into the memory of experience. For farito y mareas (la memoria), over 20 rounds of colors were tested, varying the hue and transparency.

I am interested in experiences that language struggles to capture and in the attempt to touch fleeting and constantly changing experiences—the spaces between knowing and seeing, experience and memory, and the real and the imagined.