"Canoe II" is the latest limited edition print to be produced by Sue Nash. The original oil painting from which this print was reproduced is in the permannent collection of the Hotel Hana-Maui. The owners of the hotel chose this image as one of the pieces of art to decorate the Sea Ranch Cottage Suites in the form of Artist Proofs. These Artist Proofs will not be sold. The regular signed and numbered edition of only 195 prints has just been made available exclusively through the Hana Coast gallery as part of the Hotel Hana-Maui Collection.

As a professional historian specializing in art history, Dr. Sue Nash became interested in the mythology and visual legacy of Hawaii when she moved to Maui with her family in the middle 1980's. After the experience of living in Korea and Japan, and teaching art history in Taiwan, Sue Nash came to Hawaii with a reverence for visual symbols. And in the islands, the petroglyph is one of the best known Neolithic symbolic languages.

Petroglyphs are works of art incised or pecked onto rock. Filled with mystery and a compelling power, they speak of the universal longing to create beauty and leave a permanent record. It was these images which impelled Sue Nash to become an Artist/Historian, a creator of art along with being a teacher of art history.

There are in the U.S. only a handful of artist-historians ... painters and printers who cultivate the discipline of the historian, but whose end products are pictures rather than words. Dr. Sue Nash is one of them. She spent several years preparing for her new career in art, studying printmaking and papermaking at Hui Noeau Visual Art Center on Maui, and as a member of Lama Ho'iki, an organization dedicated to perpetuating the arts of Hawaii.

Based on the ancient Hawaiian petroglyphs, Sue Nash interprets these powerful island images onto paper using the drypoint intaglio and monoprint printing techniques with oil-based printing inks. She uses the time-honored medium of printmaking because of its immediacy and responsiveness. Nash seldom exceeds four or five prints in an edition, and each of these prints is itself a unique monoprint. More recently, Dr. Nash has gone back to oil on canvas using vividly hued primary colors to portray her images.