I’m after nuance, fleeting glimpses, dreams and emotive journeys that take my work past banal interpretation and style.
I rely on the rich and ancient wisdom of my medium and its own unique language and graphic power to tell a story. When I create I use more than my eyes. Faith and chance become equal dualities that foster dialog between the print medium and myself. I’m not an alchemist though, and being self-taught I prefer to keep my print processes simple and direct. It’s my choice to make art a first love and not a second job.
I’m not discouraged by mistakes and stumblings in a final print. Often I find imperfection infuses the work with a sense of humanity. Sometimes my lines are crooked or a block has a notch taken out of its corner. These slight errors are there to remind me of our glorious imperfection.
I’m not fond of talking about myself. Not from a fear of embarrassment or the inability to articulate thought, but because words are not my medium. I’m a visual artist and language always falls short. I hate using familiar art jargon dug up and recycled from periodicals to make myself seem smart or intellectual – I’m not sure I’m either one. I love art and have loved making it since I was a young boy. I remember having to do book reports in grammar school. Drawing the covers became more important than writing what was between them.
Art as a serious vocation began while I was in my thirties after I was discharged from the army. I searched for an alternative medium that allowed draftsmanship with expression. After seeing an Albrecht Durer woodblock exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, I felt that the search was over.
I jumped in headfirst carving pieces of plywood and pine in my bedroom and garage. Hand-printing my crude images on sheets of arches. Without formal art school training I sought other ways of learning. Enrolling in workshops, looking at prints of other artists in museums and galleries, reading about the artists I love and finally collecting some of their work – the stuff I could afford. I sure my path isn’t the best or a very traditional one but it’s where I am. I’m not going to complain, I’m lucky.
I love working in relief and enjoy traditional black and white block prints. I’m slightly colorblind and have always struggled with color so I tend to gravitate towards the power and volume of black and white. What I find interesting about the relief process opposed to intaglio or litho is that it has it’s own different language. It’s less fussy and almost sculptural, like pen and ink on steroids. There’s nothing like pulling paper away from an inked block and seeing that new image.
Today, I continue to print and pull all of my relief blocks by hand and my intaglio prints from a press in my studio. I work in small editions, mostly because it’s more affordable for me. At 47 I still enjoy printmaking and am thankful the boy in me lives on.