Maura Allen | No Limits

By Gussie Fauntleroy

On her first day in a UC Berkeley extension course on serigraph/silkscreen printing, Maura Allen asked the instructor if she could print on materials other than paper. It was the mid-1990s, and Allen had just returned from New York City where she had experienced an Andy Warhol exhibition at the International Center of Photography. The show stretched 20 yards, with photography as a product of mass consumption at one end and Warhol’s singular artwork at the other.

Allen was inspired, but not to reproduce what Warhol did. “I like learning the rules and then seeing how far I can go, right to the edge of the canyon, using materials in a different way or combining them to create original work,” she says. Among the materials she ended up screen-printing on are thin layers of glass. She sometimes uses a saw to cut the glass and recombine images. Then, in the kiln, the finely ground glass containing printed images melts into itself, and the layers melt together to form a block. Slight separation between the layered imagery creates a sense of visual dimension.

Yet even when Allen is screen-printing on more conventional materials—always starting with her own black-and-white photographs—her distinctive photographic approach, combination of techniques, and unconventional mindset produce often-surprising results “I like the idea that the materials and ways things have always been presented to us—that’s not the limit,” she says. “I like to experiment, not just to experiment, but to elevate the story.”

For Allen, the constant throughline in all her creative endeavors is the story of the American West—and how its rich past is always present. Ranch life and rodeos unequivocally exist within the present-day world. But they also contain and continue aspects of earlier times, like neighbors helping one another and all-age families and communities coming together.

As an undergraduate at Stanford University, Allen’s interest in the past took the form of majoring in Latin/Classical Studies. History covers a broad span of time, she says, but the classics are “like a core sample, straight down into a culture.” She is especially fascinated with the way civilizations are formed through the interweaving of many elements—literature, music, art, politics, the physical environment, and daily life, among them. This understanding offers her insight into contemporary cultures and subcultures as well.

Even as a child growing up in Menlo Park in Northern California, Allen was full of curiosity about the world. She liked to read, loved National Geographic and encyclopedias, and enjoyed looking up words in the dictionary. In a family of eight children, she says, “We were all in charge of entertaining ourselves.” Their parents, an entrepreneur businessman father and artistic mother, ensured that their children’s entertainment was creative; one room was furnished with just four large tables piled with art-making supplies.

Allen’s craft of choice was sewing. At age 8 she finagled her way into a sewing class for 10-year-olds, and she and her sisters would stay up all night having sewathons. She loved constructing with fabric, adding layers, pattern-on-pattern. Even then, she says, she was attracted not to swirly, flowery prints but to hard-edged graphic designs.

This interest in graphics and silhouette was burned into her mind at about the same time she went on a field trip to the nearby Cantor Art Center at Stanford University. There she first saw Eadweard Muybridge’s iconic 1878 series of stop-action photographs of a running horse. The images, shot in quick succession, produce the impression of motion. The artist remembers the red-velvet display case, looking in, and seeing the picture. “That’s how I see the world,” she says, “in graphic form.”

Allen took photography classes in high school, enthralled by the darkroom process, and continued studying photography at Stanford. As a classics major, she studied in Rome for three months and returned after graduation for a year and a half to work for Stanford in the school’s intercollegiate center. She carried her camera everywhere on the streets of Rome and then in San Francisco, where she lived for 20 years. From her study of cultures, she became attuned to San Francisco’s neighborhoods as distinct cultural zones. And she absorbed both the street art and fine art all around her.

Before seeing Warhol’s exhibit, Allen was an award-winning black-and-white photographer and a traditional painter. Then she decided to merge the two. One of her early mixed-media series featured vintage signs in San Francisco. “I realized a place has specific textures, symbols, and typography,” she says. She also saw that a particular color palette is part of the culture of a place.

Today, as she spends time on Montana ranches or in the Williamson Valley near Prescott, AZ, where she and her husband, Cory, live, she is keenly aware of the palette of each place. From the office adjacent to her studio, she takes in the textures and colors of pine trees, cactus, and massive, jagged rocks, and then a sweeping view of the valley, sloping hills, and mountains beyond.

Inside Allen’s studio, a short walk from her home, are areas for the three main processes that go into her art. The entire space can become a darkroom for exposing her photographs on screens. When that’s not happening, about half the studio is dedicated to combining imagery from the screens to create one-of-a-kind paintings. Another area is for working with glass. “Every discipline, while separate, informs the rest,” she says. “There’s not a ‘fence’ between anything.”

Lately the artist has begun incorporating bits of handwritten text from old postcards and letters sent home from people visiting the West into her art. For example, embedded in one glass piece is a postcard’s spare message: Pretty country, 39 degrees this a.m. Thinking of you. Sometimes words or imagery are clear, but often they’re subtle, partly painted over. “They’re between invisible and obvious, but they come through if you look long enough,” Allen says.

In AMEAH: DREAM OF FALL, the message just beneath the painting’s surface is the young Salish woman’s connection with the earth, which Allen conveyed through color. While the woman’s regalia contains graphic elements, all the hues speak of autumn and the earth. “In meeting her and talking about her heritage, I wanted her portrait to feel like she’s coming from the land, like she is the land,” the artist says.

Allen’s approach to photography, which she learned years ago from photographer Sam Abell of National Geographic fame, is basically the opposite of how most people take pictures. For her, setting comes first and subject second. When she’s at a rodeo, for instance, she focuses on sky, then clouds, then the stadium stands, then the people. She uses an iPhone camera for background elements and a rangefinder camera for the main subject. (Allen has been named Mobile Photographer of the Year in the United States and fifth in the world by One Eyeland.) “I’m building the image from the back forward,” she says. “I stay still, I don’t move, and then a cowboy comes through. It’s like a stage set, and the players come in and out.” The tightly cropped image that results may exude a sense of energy and drama or, by being contained, it can feel tranquil and harmonious, she says.

THE PICKUP MAN is a mixed-media piece created from a photo Allen took at a Montana rodeo she attended on the summer solstice for several years. She wanted to capture the feeling of the crowd in the background but also wanted the cowboy to come forward, using a single palette but different tonalities. And she inserted colors in not-always-predictable places. “It’s like the horse is running by, and the colors are running with him,” she says, and then smiles. “The beauty is that I have an image and then I take that character and story and re-create the scene any way I want it.”

representationGallery MAR, Park City, UT; Grace Renee Gallery, Carefree, AZ; Mountain Trails Gallery, Jackson, WY; Sorrel Sky Gallery, Santa Fe, NM, and Durango, CO; Standard Art Gallery, Steamboat Springs, CO; Exhibit by Aberson, Tulsa OK; Valley Fine Art, Aspen, CO; Dick Idol Signature Gallery, Whitefish, MT; L.A. Design, Missoula, MT; www.mauraallen.com.

This story appeared in the February/March 2023 issue of Southwest Art magazine.

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