Piece description from the artist
Somber landscape is an ink drawing that is in many ways a hybrid between drawing and painting. To create the background, I used Windsor and newton's highly archival pigment-based art markers. These markers initially laid down like a drawing medium, with ink that sinks into the substrate. As the markers were layered to create complex color blends, the colors sat on the surface more and became easier to move them around and blend them. This property allowed me to create some very painterly effects in the sky and background.
The material is a paper/polymer composite. It is rigid and resists the warping and wrinkling that can trouble pure paper, it holds up to many layers of marker application, and it is also absorbent. One interesting property of this archival engineered "paper" is the granulation achieved by the marker pigments, which seems to be aided by the paper fibers and novel granularity of the material.
The foreground subject – the trees – were inked in using Prismacolor archival pigmented ink felt tip pens and India ink and white ink using a dip pen (and mixed grays). Parts of the piece are very painterly and parts very graphic and drawn. The combination creates an unusual dynamic that is very identifiably a Valluzzi piece.
Dr. Regina Valluzzi has an extensive scientific background in nanotechnology and biophysics. She has been a scientist in the chemical industry, a green chemistry researcher, a research professor at the engineering school at Tufts, a start-up founder engaged in technology commercialization, and a start-up and commercialization consultant.
Even during periods of intense activity as a scientist, Dr. Valluzzi has always held a strong interest in the visual arts and in visual information. While she majored in Materials Science at MIT, she also obtained a second degree in music and a minor in visual studies. Visual arts have managed to permeate her technical work; during her Ph.D in Polymer Science and Engineering at UMass Amherst, she completed a thesis that required advanced electron microscopy, image analysis, and theoretical data modeling. These experiences provided the visual insight and information that now influences much of her artwork.
Dr. Valluzzi’s work has been included in private collections across the US, UK, Germany, Canada, Japan, Netherlands, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Dubai and Malta, and in the corporate collection of "Seyfarth Shaw" Boston law offices around Boston. She has a selection of pieces on loan to the MIT Materials Science and Engineering Department as indoor public art. Her accomplishments include having published thirty articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals, having made several scientific patents, having been a subject matter expert for an encyclopedia chapter, and having been invited to speak at science talks across the US, Europe, and Japan.
Her newsletter is a good source of ongoing information: http://eepurl.com/daiLQ
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