Figures, foam, and finding a voice

Annette Mitchell opens up to a page in a black, spiral-bound portfolio, exhibiting a picture of an entirely hand-made quilt swimming with reds, yellows, blues and oranges. The swatches of decorative fabrics contrast quite harmoniously on the quilt – some connoting cages and confines, others fluid profiles of men dancing and rejoicing.

"This one I was inspired to do after watching ‘Throw Down Your Heart,'" she says, referring to a documentary featuring banjo star Béla Fleck. In the documentary, Fleck attempts to bring the banjo back to Africa, the land of the instrument's ancestors. "There's one scene on the beach," Annette tells me, "where the European ships used to come in. They would say ‘Throw down your heart, here, on African soil, because what lies ahead will be Hell.' And so I made this quilt as a response to people who have been stolen from their homeland." 

Annette has been teaching for the Art Department at Plymouth State since 1979. Before settling in New Hampshire, she learned the foundations of her trade in Alabama and Colorado. "I grew up in rural Alabama," she said. "There was no art, no music, no theater." 

During her first year at Auburn University in Alabama, Annette was, for the first time, fully exposed to and immersed in an artistic and cultivated landscape. "I told my parents that I wanted to be an artist. I didn't care what they would say. I just knew I had to try it." Annette received multiple degrees in Fine Arts, including a bachelor's degree from the University of Denver in Colorado and two doctorates from the University of Alabama. 

Annette showed me a sample of her students' recent artworks, piled in a stack atop a file cabinet. She sifted through an assortment of figure drawings, sketched simply and in an array of carefully chosen hues. "This one," she said as she unrolls a large black scroll, "was done by a student who was assigned to draw something larger than herself." The sketch is the entire backside of a woman's figure, drawn about six feet tall and in pink hues against the black canvas, perfectly to scale.

She next showed me a sample of the prints her students had made with foam plates. Among the artworks were pictures of dogs, cartoonish women in polka dot bikinis, mountainous landscapes, and a few abstract patterns. Students first carve out and stencil the desired images onto plates of foam, then paint over the raised surfaces and press the painted plate onto paper, producing a vivid mirror image of the stamp.

Annette and her students began printing with foam plates years ago, when she was teaching an art class for non-art majors. "I had no budget for the class," she told me, and was thus faced with the challenge of finding inexpensive materials that were also versatile. Though her budget has expanded over the years, Annette still resorts to using the foam plate as a medium in her classes, and for obvious reasons. The images are clean, consistent, impressively detailed, and beautiful. She showed me a few prints of her own, my favorites being two chromatic conversing pigs in a cornfield. "I never felt like I had to be serious in my artwork," she says, laughing.

In the three decades she's spent in Plymouth, Annette has taught her students how to use and embrace color, how to capture the human form, how to be creative even when limited, and how to find fun and freedom in their artwork. "I want to encourage all students to find their own style and color palate, their own voice."