Printmaker, Ann Klingensmith, is September artist at Creston:Arts Gallery

Printmaking is the art of creating an image by transferring the coloring medium, either ink or paint, to paper, canvas, fabric or even wood.

There are more than a dozen printmaking processes — intaglio, monotype, relief, lithography, stenciling — and visitors to the Creston:Arts Gallery in the restored Creston Depot have the opportunity to view a small sampling of the different methods as the gallery features the art of Ann Klingensmith throughout the month.

Klingensmith is a former Creston graduate who now teaches art at Iowa Wesleyan University in Mount Pleasant.

She got into printmaking as an art student at Graceland University in Lamoni.

“I really emphasized painting,” said Klingensmith, “but I took a lot of printmaking. In fact, they kind of made up classes for me so I could keep taking printmaking. It was pretty cool. I just love working with my hands. It’s a very physical kind of art and somehow I just resonated with that.”

After Graceland, Klingensmith received her Master of Arts and her Master of Fine Art in printmaking from the University of Iowa.

While she was in school, her classes emphasized intaglio processes of printmaking, such as engraving and etching, and lithography, and it was while she was attending classes at the University of Iowa that she fell in love with relief printing and has continued to work in that primarily.

Relief printing, Klingensmith said, “is really about the simplest kind of printmaking you can do by just taking a piece of wood and carving out what you don’t want to print and leaving what you want to print.”

She also does monotype, or monoprinting, which she said is similar to the way a photographer might build layers in a photograph. An image is painted on glass and then transferred to paper. Then, the glass is cleaned off, the print is allowed to dry and another layer of the image is painted on the glass and transferred to the paper. It’s a process that can be repeated, and new layers can be added as long as the paper the artist is using can handle it.

Subject matter for Klingensmith’s work ranges from the human figure to crows and she will create a series of images based on the subject.

“I worked for years with the idea of mask, and the human figure and mask,” said Klingensmith. “I’ve worked with the figure of the dog. I really, for the last 20-some years, have been working with crows and the corvid family primarily, and just that’s kind of a fascination that goes way back. I had a sabbatical many years ago and was able to do some more study of crows in literature and reading about their habits and it was pretty enlightening. They’re incredibly intelligent.”

Klingensmith’s life is art.

She said other than reading and spending time with family, she doesn’t really have any hobbies. She doesn’t have a flower garden and she can’t cook.

“I do art all day,” said Klingensmith. “It’s great. I help people do art. I make art. Not as much as I’d like to, but that’s part and parcel with being in education.”

Creston:Arts Gallery will host a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. Friday with refreshments. Klingensmith regrets that she cannot attend.