Boatyard Near Falmouth Harbor

Kevin Fletcher

At a casual glance Kevin Fletcher's monotypes and etchings can appear to be photographic, with their rich blacks and silvery grays but, upon further examination, are anything but photographic. Fletcher's images are spontaneous and, after pulling the paper from the matrix, he assigns each work a title, often based on his first response and his active imagination. It is up to the viewers to draw their own conclusions.

Fletcher created this imaginary boatyard, near Falmouth Harbor on Cape Cod in Massachusetts based on personal memories. He applied a softground to a zinc plate, scraping and manipulating it using cardboard chips and then biting the plate with acid. He approached this like a monotype, evolving the image but not formally editioning it, creating more of a monoprint.

In an October 13, 2007 review of Fletcher's monoprints in a San Francisco exhibition, San Francisco Chronicle reviewer Kenneth Baker made the following observations:

"North Bay artist Kevin Fletcher has verged on the topical now and then in his masterly monotypes, evoking industrial architecture - and thus, industrialism - in ruins…. Contemporary graphic art does not get any better.

Fletcher can stand comparison with Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778), whose etchings of imaginary prison interiors they sometimes bring to mind. Fletcher has added monochrome tints to several of the new prints, enhancing their suggestions of smoky light."