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Username: beeherd
Member Since: July 2009
Member Since: July 2009
San Francisco, CA United States
My artist’s statement is that I don’t like artist’s statements. Generally speaking when a visual artist has to tell you what he is trying to achieve, he hasn’t succeeded. The language of convention is often orotund* and flowery disguising the... more
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| Gender: | Male |
| Artist Statement: | My artist’s statement is that I don’t like artist’s statements. Generally speaking when a visual artist has to tell you what he is trying to achieve, he hasn’t succeeded. The language of convention is often orotund* and flowery disguising the vagueness of the artist’s intent; as for example “I use an alphabet of violet to create a semiotic canvas open to individual interpretation by the viewer.” If art is meant as communication then we have more responsibility than to paint “clouds” and have the audience tell us what they see in them. With that caveat I shall talk a little about the medium of woodcut. Woodcut is a reduction of reality. It takes a world of color and reduces it to black and white. It takes a world of shade and gradation and makes it linear and binary, either black or white. The craft of woodcut is to take those two notes and delude the viewer into imagining a more complete world. Shading and texture are created by placing lines of varying widths next to each other. The art form is as much puzzle resolution as observation. Another reduction is the editing of the world to the fragment I want you to pay attention to: the twist of a torso; the curl of a lock of hair; the inequity of the financial world; the iniquity of a lawyer. I am emphasizing what has caught my eye by taking things out of the frame… and then I hope to make you stare longer by assembling the pieces in interesting ways; here a straight line meets two opposing curves (and a knuckle is born). So you should be able to look closer into my cutting and enjoy the swirls of line as abstractions. Enough said. *See I did it myself, orotund means pompous and emphatic. |
| Education: | B.A. Bio-Psych, Lawrence University M.A. Art, University of Wisconsin- Madison |
| Exhibitions: | Books illustrated with woodcuts include: One of the Missing, Yolla Bolly Press; Totems, Harper Row; The First Christmas Tree, Paraclete Press, Neptune's Nursery, Scribner's, and Neuropsychology of Creativity, Sybervision |
| Artist Tags: | woodcuts, black & white photography, sierras, yosemite |
