Artist's Statement

Ouida Touchón is a visual artist from New Mexico who spends most of her waking moments at the easel or the press. She has her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in Painting, and her Masters of Art from the University of Missouri at Kansas City. In addition she has studied with mentors and distinguished printmakers and painters in Italy, Mexico, and the United States.
She lives with two devoted Standard Poodles in a small historic adobe home in a Hispanic village near Las Cruces and her studio is in an old storefront nearby where she operates two presses and also directs a printmaking collaborative called La Prensa/Southwest Printmakers.
Her paintings and relief prints are shown in galleries across the United States. Many of her larger handprints are hand rubbed with a baren, due to their size and/or the limitations of her traveling studio that she sets up wherever she goes. Her solo show in Guanajuato, Mexico in 2001 contained numerous hand rubbed prints. Life is good for this artist, and frequent travel to other artistic sites keeps her energized with endless ideas. Her maxim: Living Life as Art.

"As I develop my woodcut handprints, I am preoccupied with the realm of observation and its edges. What is the distance between the observed and the invented, the real and the poetic? The space within this construct engages my mind and urges my expression through plasticity and mark making.

This exploration ties into my ongoing interest in the depiction of space. How the eye interprets it, how it can be a source of confusion, vertigo, surrender.

And then there is the phenomenon itself. Do I give in to it and go completely into the visual scintillation or do I attempt to pierce the WOWness, and find a broader voice, a more universal response? Is there still a place for beauty, an intelligent beauty? I find it in the mountain's shadows, in the reflection of light on water, in the earth's dramatic forms that become themselves over a course of millions of years.

I am passionately involved in the art of printmaking, and portraying an emotionally rich world through observational imagery and poetic space. The act of carving the plate, of rolling on the ink, and of pulling the print is all part of an expressive and very personal dance."

Home
Artists