Woodcut Reverie
A childhood playmate’s mother, and grandmother, both single parents, cloistered themselves in cramped, home studios that children were not allowed to enter, to paint portraits and landscapes that few people ever set eyes on. The ethos I grew up in was that an artist draws, paints and sculpts purely for their own satisfaction. By my teen years I fell under the direction of an excellent art teacher who’s instructors at the Brooklyn Museum School included social-realist Ben Shahn. Pen and ink, egg tempera and silkscreen were the methods I practiced and helped to produce a portfolio that gained my entrance to Pratt Institute. During my three years there I made forays across the East river, involving myself in the burgeoning gallery scene on the lower east side of Manhattan.
Practicing sculptors in the early 70’s were freeing their art from the constraints of four walls and siting it outdoors. Nancy Holt, Richard Long and Robert Smithson led an Earth Art movement with emblematic works that seemed to bypass the traditional steps in the process of creating art. Where they were going was where I wanted to be. What I didn’t understand was that the Earth Art movement relied as much on the gallery and museum systems as previous art trends. (Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, recently added to the National Register of Historic Places, was financed by his gallery representation, which sold his drawings, paintings and collages.) So, after a year in a loft on the Bowery, working as a bicycle messenger by day and making sculpture by night, I left NYC and returned to Vermont.
Without a dealer, an agent, or a studio full of two-dimensional works to sell, there was little chance of making a living as a three-dimensional artist in the landscape. I needed to find patrons willing to commission works on their land. An art collector was unlikely to consider commissioning a large, fixed-in-place, artwork but a homeowner would be willing to hire me to do hardscaping around their place. Over time, through the medium of natural stone and traditional handcraft I discovered a backdoor into the realm of art making outdoors.
A recent experience left me feeling that I’d returned to my artistic roots. After completing a land art commission on a remote stretch of coastline in the Norwegian archipelago I was encouraged to try making a woodcut by a new acquaintance. Are Andreassen, a printmaker living on the island, handed me a birch panel and some carving tools. A sketch on tracing paper of a design to memorialize my time on Sorvær was transferred to the panel. The carving process took a couple of exciting, and a bit anxious, days. Having the design emerge, in relief and reversed from the sketch, was a brain-twister.
In his seaside, sun-filled studio, Are inked the panel, placed it on the press bed, laid a sheet of paper over it and told me to turn the wheel that drew the panel under a pressure-producing cylinder. What came out the other side was magical. After a few trial proofs that helped me see how I could make changes in the woodcut to improve the image, we made an impression of ten numbered prints.
The imagery I drew on for the woodcut depicted the recently built sculpture, a slate floor that I designed and laid for our host, and a bird's eye view of the surrounding islands. Bordering the three scenes was a pattern adapted from a rug in the cottage where we stayed.
The print extended my relationship to the land art beyond the time I spent making it. And it was a purely personal artwork produced in a manner that harkened back to my earliest artistic strivings. Sometimes the best direction forward is discovered by going back.