Steve & Bonnie Harmston

We have been creating hand-printed serigraphs or screen prints for over 30 years now. Our inspiration is found literally all around us, many coming from our travels throughout this beautiful diverse country that we live in. Most of the work begins as a pencil sketch, influenced from photos we bring back from our travels and some are completely imagined landscapes. These sketches soon become hand-cut pieces of film.

The medium of screen printing while very time consuming and labor intensive, seems well suited for our creative process. The act of stencil cutting. is often very calming and is our paintbrush of choice. The stencils are cut from a masking film using an Exacto knife. Each color has a separate stencil and there can be as many as 30 – 40 stencils. Each stencil is further cut away for the next color, sometimes 4 or 5 times and soon there is no stencil left. Pulling the ink across the screen and onto the paper, watching each piece come to life one color at a time is still pretty exciting. Often it takes between one to two months to complete each edition which we choose to limit to 50 or less and they are never reprinted again.

For the past 15 years we have made our living by selling our work at art shows all over the country. There is a satisfaction that comes when you meet the people who love your work and they meet you. This year has taught us that those relationships have stretched beyond the art shows as our collectors have reached out to us. We love making art that makes people happy, art that reminds them of a time when they visited a place they loved. Art that shares the beauty of a place just outside the door.