Photopolymer Printmaking

On her way to work, Dona regularly makes a point of passing through the Snug Harbor Botanical Garden, taking in the beauty of the many extraordinary blooming flowers and plants to begin her day. A daily visit to a beautiful and peaceful place—one that takes you outside of your regular preoccupations and concerns—can become a sort of meditation to clear one’s mind at the start of the day. I imagine that the colors, shapes, and brilliance of the flowers that she enjoys stay in her mind throughout the day. Photographing those colorful and luscious flowers as a way to keep images of them alive after the flowers fade is, of course, a familiar and common response. But what Dona did with those photographs was more unique and more directed, and was certainly not so simple or common.

What Dona has said she wanted from those photographs was not simply to record what the flower looked like in the moment she saw it, but instead she wanted to build a unique image from a photograph that would express the feelings those flowers ignited in her. For her, that was not the photograph itself. She wanted to create something that was, in a way, beyond the photograph, expressive of the flowers and her reaction to the flowers.

She explored how she might go about doing that, and gravitated to using a fairly unfamiliar and technically exacting printmaking process that begins with a photographic image but has the potential to build on and transform that original photo. Through light sensitive photopolymer intaglio plates she can expose a photographic image onto the plate, but alter that image—layering color, changing the tones—at various steps in the process. The ultimate result is a hand-printed etching. What she has done in this work is to pursue expressing how the flowers made her feel, and not simply duplicating what they looked like. She has given them a life beyond the brief life they had in the garden.

Often the richness of colors in her prints feels otherworldly—almost as if the flowers themselves are emerging from a deep, dark space and exploding into the light with an inner glow and glory. These works feel alive and rich, with a Renaissance chiaroscuro of layered color and delicate tone creating depth. Sometimes the colors jolt us away from the naturalistic and expected palette of flowers but are never garish or out of place. Other times the work layers delicate touches of color, almost like a watercolor paint has gently touched the petals against the open clarity of the daylight around them. They are always tenderly, sweetly, expressing the worlds that these flowers live in, and we delight in the variety of detail, variation of form and color, and feeling.

Nancy Diessner
Instructor Photopolymer printmaking,
Zea Mays Non-Toxic Printmaking Institute, USA
August 2023

DONA GEETHANI KIRIELLA

In her “Simplicity of Nature” series, Sri Lankan-American artist Dona Kiriella speaks a universal language, the language of flowers.

Images of flowers are represented in every world culture, in all art forms, throughout history. They convey information and emotion that is understood in deep, meaningful and often symbolic ways. Flowers themselves embellish formal gardens and wild landscapes everywhere. People gather flowers for bouquets and corsages. They give them as gifts of love. Flowers represent purity and compassion, life and death, beauty and transformation. 

Dona Kiriella examines individual flowers closely through her camera and gathers detailed information. The photographs are beautiful artifacts of the artist’s immediate sensory experience, but they are only the beginning. When the photographs are transformed into polymer photogravure prints, the forms and colors change as she mixes inks and wipes plates by hand. As a printmaker, the artist skillfully enhances the emotional intensity of the pictures of flowers isolated in deep empty space. 

In each print a singular flower calls for a prolonged meditative viewing. Observers are drawn in by the details of the petals, the suggestion of withering in the bloom, the subtle beauty of the delicate surfaces (sometimes perfect, sometimes bruised), and the unexpected colors that hint at a process underway. Mindful viewers absorb the emotional intensity that the artist imparted as they contemplate each image. Along with the artist, viewers celebrate the beauty of one flower, the perfection of all life cycles and transitions, and the profound “Simplicity of Nature” that underlies our fragile and shifting human understanding about complex forces that control our universe.

Katharine Kreisher  printmaker/photographer 

Professor of Art 

Department of Art and Art HistorAnderson Center for the Arts

Hartwick College

Oneonta NY 13820

Dona Kiriella’s shift into photopolymer printmaking opens a world of possibilities as she explores the theme ‘Simplicity of Nature’.  She begins with a photographic image of a single blooming flower head, or plant that captures the exquisite detail, symmetry and variation in plant life that is exposed to a photopolymer etching plate.

The quiet presentation of a single multi-petaled blossom opens the viewer into a vibrant world of nuance, offering the beauty a flower in the prime of bloom, others in a state of aging beauty, their petal edges curled.  Or the elegant, stark beauty of a dried seed pod held erect by a slight stem.  There is a boldness, a simplicity, in the way most of her images occupy the center and float in an amorphous background. Moody browns transform into a hint of red, yellow and purple lights. Nuanced greens shift from nearly black to yellow-green light. Sharp-tipped petals that expand from their center move to paper’s edge take on a porcupine, animal-like nature.

Kiriella’s experience a as a painter makes her a ‘natural’ at skillfully blending and removing multiple inky colors from the same photopolymer plate. She then prints them in one pass through the press, with the effortless complexity of a single bloom floating in a field of color and light.

Rebecca Muller, mixed media artist and writer, Florence, MA