Hawai'i's sense of color and intimacy are reflected in the Honolulu Printmakers 80th annual exhibition.

"There are a lot of prints that take in and create environment, and relate to the ideas of place or locale," says Laura Berman of the Kansas City Art Institute, who served as the exhibition's independent juror. "I am definitely a proponent of what we take in, we put back out into the world. As artists, what we make and what we visually consume absolutely transfers back to what we decide to create."

The show is broken into five sections: Missing Information; Pattern, Color, Nature; Blue; Graphic Prints; and Duality. Berman tethers these themes together, though the images vary in scale and technique.

Familiar names like Allyn Bromley, Deborah Nehmad and Duncan Dempster made the cut but new talent also emerges in the show, which is part of its appeal. Of the 230 pieces submitted for consideration, Berman says the 104 pieces selected affirm strength of community among the artists. Decades ago, Hawai'i printmakers struggled to find a suitable workspace. Since 1993, however, the Academy Art Center, which offers classes, workshops and a space, has served as a headquarters for printmakers. The annual show is the signature event for Honolulu Printmakers and has always been a juried exhibition.

Most of the artwork nods to traditional printmaking practices — intaglio, etching, woodcuts, photogravure — and is two-dimensional. There are layered pieces, collages and mixed media. Overall, the show is primarily personal and reflective, as opposed to public and graphic. There are no "printstillation" pieces or consumptive multiples.

That makes sense in Hawai'i as we don't have layers of graphic posters splattered around our walking communities. We don't have a history of grand installation work. But we do have our stories, our quiet vistas and our sense of color.

Several pieces in the show contain intense swaths of color, such as Anne Irons' monoprint, "Pele's Passage," and Hiroki Morinoue's woodblock print "Earth Cycle." Berman noted that many of show's entries demonstrate a sophisticated relationship with color, primarily in interpretations of both blue and yellow.

"I expected to see a lot of color," Berman says. "And I am very happy that I did, because I respond quite well to color."

She doesn't hold color to its technical definition, however. Berman's interpretation allows color to be, well, imagined.

In Vincent Hazan's screenprint, "Reconstructed House," he creates the shape of a house with flakes of termite droppings — showing nature at work in Hawai'i, with a good dose of humor. Elizabeth Uryase's "Illumination," an all-white collage made from the cast-offs of intaglio printmaking, offers translucence in its new form and pays tribute to the medium and idea of process.

And though there is an area of the show devoted to bold strokes and graphic elements, much of the artwork on display contains qualities of softness as well as strength in narrative and portraiture, Berman says. Bromley's large screenprint with hand manipulation, "Na Maka," shows two figures in classic portraiture, their faces blurred to the point of erasure. The detail of the flocked wallpaper in the background contrasts with indistinct, haunting faces. David Smith's "A Moment of Consequence," which won an award of excellence, captures a man seemingly in mid-flip with a looming sky in the background. Its sepia tones enforce the power of the narrative.

"There is a lot of strong intaglio work and photogravure, which are both processes which can soften the mark and create tonality," Berman says. "There are also a lot of intimate images. Printmaking is a great carrier for intimacy with images because the line is intimate."

Sue Kiyabu is a freelance writer living in Honolulu.