DAN WELDEN
Haystack Crescendo
August 23 – October 26, 2025
Opening and Artist Reception
Saturday, August 23, 5-7pm
with an artist demonstration at 3pm
Mitchell • Giddings Fine Arts is excited to debut Haystack Crescendo, hybrid etchings hand-embellished by master printer and painter Dan Welden. Also featured is a series of new paintings by the artist. An opening and artist reception is scheduled for Saturday, August 23, 5 – 7, and the exhibit will continue through October 26. Prior to the opening, at 3pm Welden will provide a short demonstration of his working techniques, and a discussion of the creation of Haystack Crescendo. On October 24-26, Dan Welden will be offering a Solarplate/Monotype printmaking workshop at Mitchell • Giddings Fine Arts, downstairs in our new multi-use studio space, Studio 7. Contact the gallery or check the website for updates—space is limited.
Early this summer, Dan Welden completed an artist residency at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, in Deer Isle, Maine. He arrived with a portfolio of beginning state, black and white etchings of his Aesop’s Fables with the goal of creating a new body of work. The solitude offered while in Maine created the opportunity for Welden to experiment and explore his unending curiosity with spontaneous responses to color. The prints act as a foundation for further image-making, which Welden hand-colors with acrylic, watercolor and crayon. The resulting works are neither pure print nor painting; he calls them hybridized prints.
“Haystack Crescendo,” the artist’s latest iteration of Aesop’s Fables, is a remarkable series of hybrid prints. Showcasing Welden’s insatiable creative spirit as an experimental artist, it is a celebration of his curiosity to collaborate with nature. The coalescence of print, painting and line—along with time and weather which began quietly 50 years ago, has now been masterfully orchestrated by Welden the conductor.
“With the excitement of creating at Haystack, I experienced a sense of ‘awareness’ that my mark-making through the lines, colors and forms had become kindred to an orchestra conductor hearing the energy of music. My act of creating a symphonic painting resonates when there is no ego separating that birth of pure energy.”
About a decade ago Dan Welden discovered a stack of 11 oxidized, deteriorating zinc plates in an abandoned building. They were rusted together; he pried them apart which produced pairs—mirror images—of the corrosion on the plates. After observing nature’s design, he scribed and etched his own marks and lines, and printed them—front and back, 22 altogether—in black ink. Honoring the theme of opposites he named the series Aesop’s Fables.
“I am an experimenter, explorer and a seeker of beauty. When I set out to work, there is no image in mind, but the vision unfolds as the work evolves. It usually begins with simple forms and marks with broad areas. It then becomes more refined and delicate and knits itself together through line.”
“I am a process person, interested in employing materials and techniques to the ‘landscape’ of my mind. My drawings, paintings and prints evolve from the idea of linear pathways echoing from the tracks of animals in nature, fissures in rock palisades and the patterns created by my hands becoming ‘playful’ with my tools.”
“Learning to read a printing plate before inking, is like sensing the log before wielding the axe. So goes my act of creativity, being aware of what resonates in front of me and responding with marks, colors and textures.”
Included in Dan Welden’s Haystack Crescendo exhibition of hand-colored etchings, we are happy to have a selection of recent mixed media paintings.
“I’m a printmaker, a painter, I write a little bit, and I’ve discovered many things and I feel guilty. I was thinking about it because I am a very dedicated printmaker and I’ve been painting lately, so I feel guilty about having a good time.
It’s an interesting kind of feeling because I’m enjoying the painting so much. I’ve always enjoyed everything creatively. Now that I’m painting, there’s some sort of guilt—shouldn’t I be making prints—but I can’t right now, I just have to paint.
I started out as a painter, and then when I went to school in Munich, I met a man who guided me into printmaking. His name was Kurt Lohwasser, and he just rolled out the red carpet for me and said, let’s do this… so I got into using stone lithography. It was Lohwasser who first put a Solarplate in my hands and suggested I try it, and after that it was all history.”
Dan Welden’s Haystack Crescendo also features an intriguing new sculpture, 12 Steps to Nirvana.
“I recently entered a juried exhibition that required non ‘typical’ prints. The thought of extending boundaries and making something limitless came with a new intention when I destroyed a number of older prints with a paper cutter making the art into strips or ribbons. I went into my forest and resurrected dead Mountain Laurel stems, cut them into 18 inch lengths and drilled a hole in each end. I wrapped and glued each branch with art, polyurethaned them and ran a hemp rope through each hole, creating a rope ladder. My 12 Steps to Nirvana was a fun printmaking episode and is currently hanging in the window at Mitchell•Giddings Fine Arts.
Mitchell•Giddings Fine Arts offers contemporary art in a variety of media, featuring emerging and established artists.
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