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Awesome Typewriter Drawings Come Alive in 3D Color

Portland-based artist Rachel Mulder brings color to her latest series of distorted typewriter drawings.
Top Heavy. Images courtesy the artist

When looking at Portland-based artist Rachel Mulder’s typewriter drawings the viewer is immediately struck by how time-consuming the process must be. The warped and abstracted portraits, rendered in black on Rives BFK white paper, have a wonderful three-dimensionality to them; but the keystrokes required to create them require extreme discipline and patience.

We recently caught up with Mulder, who is now executing these typewriter drawings in color, amplifying the three-dimensional quality of her work. As with her black-and-white drawings, these small color portraits are made in, as Mulder describes it, a “delicate, impressionistic style.” They are also surreal explorations of facial “landscapes,” featuring what she calls, “purposeful distortion.”

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Vessel. Images courtesy the artist

“Navigating through this imagery within the delineated contours of the photographs allow[s] me to scatter my focus,” Mulder says, “working in one compartment at a time and allowing the images to form like sediment collecting, a slow build of overlapping marks and feeds through the typewriter until each [is] complete.”

For this latest series of smaller scale works, Mulder used the Ace Typewriter, which has a collection of various colored ribbons. Through the Ace Typewriter & Equipment Co in Portland’s St. John’s neighborhood, Mulder was able to procure blue, purple, green and pink typewriter ribbons. This allowed her to step away from this strict focus on black and white.

Brönwyn

“My latest drawings use color in a one-dimensional way and are perhaps a timid leap into what I know is a three-dimensional jungle for me to navigate through, a place filled with still unknown and undoubtedly provocative questions,” she adds. “After years of exclusive love for grayscale I’m excited to pursue this new challenge.”

Mulder is exhibiting these works in the show Typewriter Drawings & More at Bare Bones Cafe in June and Santé Bar in July—both of which are in Portland. For the exhibition, she blew up the originals to 20" x 24" in a limited edition run of giclée prints. Each digital print is made on Canson Edition Etching Rag using archival inks, and 30% of Mulder’s art sales will be donated to Public Annex, a nonprofit organization that provides accessible urban farming and arts programming for people of all abilities.

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Rachel Mulder Outline

Avery as a Rectangle

Click here to see more of Rachel Mulder’s work.

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