Summer Inspiration: Betsy Bowen Gallery & Studios – Grand Marais, MN

Summer Inspiration: Betsy Bowen Gallery & Studios – Grand Marais, MN

Colorful fresh bowls and rattle mugs by Grand Marais potter and writer Joan Farnam, at this flowering time of year. Happy Summer!

We are a small family-based printmaking operation in a scenic little coastal town in northern Minnesota. We make woodblock prints by hand, pictures of recognizable scenes mostly from the northwoods. Many of these appear as illustrations in books for children and adults.

The printmaking studio and gallery is housed in a historic church, selling the current editions of hand-printed woodcuts, as well as the work of local and regional artists.

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About

Crayons were my first love;

I remember the smell of the cardboard box with all the colorful specks on the inside.  Growing up in Chicago, I made a lot of drawings that my parents dated and filed in the important place where grownups kept their things.  I won a costume contest at Girl Scout camp because I remembered and drew the shape of the label of the Heinz ketchup bottle, me with the red outfit, my tent-mate with the mustard-yellow.

I first encountered woodcuts as a young art student in Sarasota Florida, at New College and the Ringling School of Art.  One of the first ever exhibits of the northern Canadian Inuit stone cut prints was on display at the Ringling Museum of Art, along with the grand Reubens paintings and the full-size replica of Michaelangelo’s David.  Twenty-five years later I traveled to the workshop on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic to see the stonecutting in progress.

Bread & Puppet Theater came through Sarasota in those early years.  I was overwhelmed by the rough power of street theater and larger-than-life paper mache characters.  The show was a Vietnam War protest.

Between then and now, my three boys grew up to have adventuresome lives and pursuits and children. I still live on the family homestead near Grand Marais, Minnesota, watching the horses and chickens and the garden grow.  I’ve moved the studio into town, tucked into a former historic Lutheran church with plenty of room for the presses and woodblock prints and books, and to build and store the big puppets for our annual community Solstice pageants.

I like what I do.

The web store is open all year.

In addition to the hand-printed woodcuts, we have books, cards, calendars, and t-shirts. We are shipping weekly.  Browse here.

Betsy Bowen Gallery & Studios

Open 11-5 daily, May through mid-October, Fridays and Saturdays through the winter and by chance or appointment.

301 1st Avenue West

Grand Marais, MN

ICYMI

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