Barnaby, Margaret

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Barnaby

Capturing the natural environment unique to the island of Hawai’i, Margaret Barnaby is a masterful printmaker and illustrator gathering the intricate details of hapu’u tree ferns, ohia and koa trees, mynah birds, feral pigs all from her backyard studio in Volcano Village. However, the one species that she’d most like to see is the ʻAlalā (Hawaiian crow) which is now extinct in the wild but is being bred and raised at nearby Keauhou Bird Conservation Center. “Often the prints portray things that I’d like to see combined with real observation. I see a rare plant in bloom and then picture it with an ‘Alalā flying through the foliage.”
Margaret begins her multiple-plate woodcut prints by drawing and planning for several days. Then it takes her two or three days to hand-carve each plywood plate. Each plate will print one or more colors in the final picture. Depending on the number of plates required, carving can take up to a month. After making several trial copies of the print, she inks the first plate, puts it and the paper through an etching press, and repeats the process to make ten to fifteen copies. She goes through the inking and printing process for each successive color, carefully positioning the plate and paper for each pass through the press.
Over her 30-year career, Margaret has been a jeweler, sculptor, and painter as well as a printmaker. In the Honolulu Print-makers annual show her woodblock prints were awarded the Jean Charlot prize, the John Chin Young Award for Outstanding Relief (2011), and Honblue purchase awards in 2007 and 2011, as well as Hawai’i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts purchase awards in 2008 and 2011.

SAMSUNG CAMERA PICTURES View work by Margaret Barnaby by visiting her page on our online store.

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