PRESS RELEASE

Featured at Lyghtesome Gallery from March 9 to April 3, 2004 is a series of eight viscosity colour etchings by well-known Yarmouth printmaker Cecil Day, inspired by the spectacular vistas and rugged terrain of Newfoundland's Gros Morne National Park. In the fall of 1999 Cecil Day spent a month living and working on the west coast of Newfoundland through the National Park's Artist -in-Residence Program, awarded annually by the Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador in St. John's, NF. Day stayed in a house built for the park rangers, overlooking Bonne Bay in Woody Point. She divided her time between exploring as much of the park as possible, documenting it with photographs, drawings and watercolours for use on her return home, and as part of the educational component of the program, working with children in grades K-6 from Bonne Bay Academy, the community school just around the corner from where she was staying. Asking the children to help her learn more about Woody Point and Gros Morne, not by telling but by drawing, she took what they produced and incorporated as many drawings as possible into two large etchings which she gave to the school and to the Park. She also printed part of the plates for the children, hoping they would enjoy seeing their work as part of a larger piece and come to understand some of the differences between a drawing and an etching. The series of prints on display at Lyghtesome, all dated 2001, represents most of the etchings produced from Day's own experience at Gros Morne upon her return. They capture the rich textures and grand scale of the table lands, the fiords and the coastline within the Park. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Cecil Day studied painting at Wellesley College, Wellesley, Mass., and Indiana Univ., Bloomington, Indiana and completed an MFA in painting at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Day's extensive career in printmaking has lead her to be an artist-in residence at the Windsor Printmaker's Forum in Windsor, Ontario, St. Michael's Printshop in St. John's, NF and the Cite Interantionale des Arts, in Paris. She works in both woodcut and etching and often extends the printing process to fabric and papier mache and hand-made books. The touring exhibit entitled "Dark Forest", a collaborative show with Mary Dryburgh of prints and hangings, was shown at St. Francis Xavier University Art Gallery in 1996. While in Antigonish at that time, Day put on a workshop in viscosity-colour etching for members of the Society of Antigonish Printmakers. Her work was also part of the "Inksmithing" Exhibition put on at the St. F.X. Univ. Gallery last fall by the Nova Scotia Printmakers Association, for which she was the co-recipient of the People's Choice Award. Her affiliation with Lyghtesome Gallery began ten years ago with the inclusion of her work in the Lyghtesome Print Folio. Cecil Day lives and work in Maitland, N.S. She is currently a Board Member of Visual Arts Nova Scotia and served for many years on the board and as a printmaking instructor for th'YARC in Yarmouth NS. Her work can be found in numerous private and public collections including the Canada Council Art Bank, the National Library of Canada, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and the permanent collections of Acadia Univ., Memorial University, Harvard University and the University of Houston.