ARCHIVED WRITING
Woodcuts, Straight-Up and Restructured
Sept. 9–Oct. 31, 2021 at Second State Press, Philadelphia
About My Woodcut Process
The woodcuts in this exhibit are from two suites of prints created between 2018 and 2020, and then “restructured” during 2021.
First, my art is primarily visual. It does not generally tell stories, or have a political, social, or personal-identity basis. It exists because there is something that I see that stimulates me to react to it visually. That may be color, texture, or the way that, for example, a tangle of roots on the forest floor creates a natural “bas relief” or “drawing”. My art does not really have a back-story (though I can talk more or less endlessly about the why and where of my images). It is pretty much a “what-you-see-is-what-you-get” proposition.
These woodcuts started as drawings, using pen and ink and archival brush-tip markers. The drawings are all 8” x 8” or 7” x 10.5” and were done from a collection of photographs I have been making since a visit to Japan in 2010 where I became interested in the convoluted forms of trees in Japanese temple gardens. That led to the study and close observation of tree roots, bark and other such details. Since the early 90s my work has been moving away from broad landscape depictions to detailed observations of elements within the landscape: first rocks and rock formations and then trees and their “anatomy”.
After doing many such small drawings, I conceived of enlarging some of them and creating prints where the physicality of the paper and ink would be a strong presence. Woodcut seemed an obvious choice. I am not interested in a printmaking process per se, rather, what a particular process can do to realize the image I hold in my head.
I wanted to preserve all the details of the drawings and so investigated using laser-etching technology to cut my woodblocks. I joined NextFab, a Philadelphia maker space, and learned how to use their laser-etchers. I then experimented with the material I would use, half-inch birch-veneer plywood, to determine the best depth of cut that would preserve all the details but not render fine details too weak to be printed on an etching press (a compromise between the wood’s strength and making open areas deep enough to not false-ink).
First, I scanned my drawings and increased their contrast in Photoshop so that the blacks were really solid black. I then placed them in Adobe Illustrator and used an Illustrator function to create vector files capable of being read by the laser etcher. (A nice aspect of these vector files is that they can be enlarged infinitely without losing any details or creating pixilation.)
For my prints, I enlarged the final Illustrator file more than two diameters. In addition, the colors in the resulting files need to be set so that the laser-etcher can read them correctly: a particular RGB black for the laser etching itself and a certain RGB red for the function that cuts the etched block out of the surrounding wood.
After the blocks were cut, it was necessary to work by hand into many open areas, deepening them using traditional wood-cut gauges so that the inked roller would not false-ink areas that should print white.
The finished blocks were printed with damp paper on an etching press, using moderate pressure. The inked blocks were dropped on the press bed into the surrounding wood frame left after cutting the blocks, so that the roller of the press would not have to ride up over the thickness of the wood block as it passed through the press. The resulting prints exhibit more embossing of the surface than if printed on dry paper.
I created a very small edition of the “straight-up” prints, and used many additional copies as the basis for the “restructured’ prints I am showing here, as well as prints that I am hand -coloring and painting into to create paintings that are then mounted on wood panels.
Caldbeck Gallery, Rockland ME, 2012
20 June – 14 July 2012
Musings on the Relativity of Time
New Pastels, gouaches and drawings
Whenever I put together a solo exhibition of my work, it is an occasion to look back on that work and reflect on its genesis. As I have often said to a number of friends and other artists —only partly in humor—making art is more like a chronic illness than a profession, since one is compelled to do it even when one is not earning a living at it. Almost all artists I know sometimes ask themselves “Why am I doing this, anyway?”
So, there are some things that hound every artist and are hard to get away from: the influences that formed you, your beliefs, the kinds of stories you like or are trying to tell, what you like to look at, and so forth. Mostly, for many of us, myself included, these things are now beyond our control. Very often, they are the elements that keep us on track, or sometimes, keep us from making the changes we want, or provide the impetus to make changes.
I am an unrepentant landscape painter. Since getting involved with the subject in my teens, and then re-discovering it in my mid-20s, there has been little else that has inspired me like landscape. I have painted in Maine for almost 35 years, but have also painted in Pennsylvania, where I live when not in Maine, and extensively throughout the western US and in Scotland. I am not particularly inured to painting familiar landscapes, or things that are picturesque or pretty, but rather, landscapes that have a certain abstraction in and of themselves. It is these abstract visual qualities that attract me.
Unlike a lot of what is going on in the art world now, which is often non-visual ideas, the execution of which may or may not be interesting (and there is much there that I do find interesting and provocative), my own work found its origins in a purely visual world. Even before I started to explore artwork as a way of life, in a sense it already was. You look at things, say an old tree, and it is not an old tree, but a convoluted series of lines, tones and shapes of things seen through the branches. It is an abstract way of looking at the world, even though the objects seen are recognized. So even now, I will be cruising down a road in June in Maine and looking at fields of buttercups. They are not fields of buttercups but, rather, a slash of lemon yellow on a green ground: a visual abstraction.
So when I set out to paint the pictures in this show, my main object was interpreting things I saw in the way that I saw them. These are all real places, rendered more or less truly, from the standpoint of draftmanship. That is why their titles usually refer to specific locations.
A little while ago, I realized that I had been painting rocks for a long time. I started doing “portraits” of rocks in the late 90s, and about the same time, made a number of painting trips to Joshua Tree National Park in southern California, where I painted big piles of rocks that really were more like giant still-lifes than traditional landscapes. Big rocks—like a huge glacial erratic (a rock picked up somewhere north and plopped down in its present location by a glacier), or arrays of rocks across a field of color, as one often sees in Maine blueberry barrens, fascinate me, first as an abstract visual phenomenon, but then as a mysterious story.
So, here I am, painting this hulking thing in front of me, a monumental element in the landscape, and looking at all the things that are happening to it and around it: multicolored patches of lichen, fallen branches, pine needles, the light flickering, everything seeming in constant motion, and that big rock just sitting there while all this goes on around it or on it. Between the flickering light, the breeze, the wind, the insects crawling and flying, the birds flitting around, and the occasional small mammals putting in an appearance, the scene is in constant motion.
So, it is not just the abstraction of color and form that I am looking at, but the constant flux of stuff—time itself—going on at various scales around it. For me, this translates to a kind of nervous energy while I paint: calligraphic lines, flicks of color, colors built up of overlapping layers of other colors. I see a fern as a blur of motion, not just a description of a leaf. I am trying to capture some of that sensation while I work. (And one reason that I have chosen to do some of my work on very rough watercolor papers, is that it’s surface is not friendly to precise description, rather to quickly made marks of fleeting impressions.)
So, what about Musings on the Relativity of Time? First, let it be said that I have never been a painter of stories, politics, conscious symbols and so forth. As I said, it is pure vision that gets to me. But I have been thinking a lot about time, after the fact as it were. Part of it is natural to someone getting older, when time seems much more finite, but starts compressing in ways that are constantly surprising. Something that you think happened three years ago, really happened seven years ago (where did the other four years go?), or you start seeing things out of sequence. A few years ago, I could put images of all my art over, say, a 20-year period in a mixed up jumble, and I could not only sequence it accurately, but generally get it in the right year and even month. That’s no longer possible. This human perception of time is, I think, not personal, but one that most folks experience as they get older. The relative scale, though, is very short.
The other scale is geological. I have long had a fascination with geology, and might have made a decent geologist if I had not succumbed to the lure of painting. However, in a long day-job career as a developer of art programs for the college publishing industry, I worked on developing the visual narratives of some of the best-known textbooks in geology, and had the unique experience of sitting with the authors of these books (more often than not, world-renowned in their fields) and getting a 1-on-1 personal tutorial in geology. Like watching the tides go in and out twice a day in Bayside, ME (something that I find just as magical now as when I first saw it over 30 years ago), I find myself looking at a pink granite boulder sitting on a ledge of gray granite, and realizing that this boulder started far under Earth’s surface as a slowly-cooling magma intrusion, called a batholith, perhaps more than a billion years ago, then pushed up toward the surface of Earth by tectonic forces, then picked up somewhere else by a glacier 30,000 or more years ago, tumbled and rounded as it scraped against other stuff in the glacier, which then melted and dropped it here.
And here it sits. At its base is a thick dandruff of flakes that have sloughed off it from freezing and thawing. On its surface are many kinds of lichen (an organism that is itself an association of algae and fungi) nourishing itself by dissolving the rock with acids it secretes. Gamma radiation is also slowly breaking it down, as is water and ice and wind. In relatively short geological order—but many more human generations—it will be reduced to tiny specs, washed to sea, and eventually subducted, to remelt and start the whole thing over again in many millions of years.
So, it surprised me that, though I didn’t sit down and try to paint the Relativity of Time, that’s what I ended up with as a byproduct. And that’s not so bad. It’s kind of like I came up with—serendipitously and subconsciously—my own contemporary version of the vanitas paintings of the 17th C.
John D. Woolsey
June 2012
Fernald's Neck Interiors, Isalos Fine Arts, Stonington ME, 2010
Fernald’s Neck Interiors
This exhibition explores the exquisite landscape interiors of Frenald’s Neck. I call them interiors because, like rooms, they are small open spaces enclosed on all sides by walls of dense woods, most of which are conifers.
Fernald’s Neck, named after the family the farmed the land more than 100 years ago, is a large peninsula jutting into Lake Megunticook near Camden, Maine. It includes about four miles of shoreline. In 1969, a group of concerned citizens formed a corporation in partnership with The Nature Conservancy to spare it from development. Originally 285 acres, over the years additional parcels have been donated or purchased bringing it’s present size to 328 acres. The Nature Conservancy transferred title to the Coastal Mountains Land Trust in 2007.
It is almost incomprehensible that this land could have been farmed, and probably much of it wasn’t. One finds foundations, walls and other signs of human habitation from time to time as one walks Fernald’s Neck’s trails. I have been hiking these trails for years, and often go in late summer and fall when the forest floor is frequently blanketed with mushrooms of all colors and descriptions.
As a painter, I am a formalist at heart. I don’t set out to tell stories, or make political statements. Rather, I find my inspiration in the pure visual quality of the subject, and how it suggests patterns of color, texture, energy, mass or insubstantiality, to name a few. As a kid, I spent most of my summers outdoors, exploring the southern Wisconsin countryside, where I grew up. I was deeply interested in nature and the relationships of natural organisms, which I would later learn comprised the discipline known as ecology. I even studied a substantial amount of biology in college, considering a career in science. Art won out, and painting and drawing became my focus.
Looking at the Fernald’s Neck interiors, I was taken by the cacophony of textures and lines—pine needles carpeting the floor with their random, even-length strokes, or branches of all sizes, shapes and colors, creating a drawing of lines on the forest floor, or in the forest canopy. There were patches of multi-colored moss and lichen, brilliant green, or nearly turquoise, and fallen leaves, brown, gray, and in the fall intense red and yellow. These functioned like the little flecks of color that Corot used to make the surface of his otherwise gray-green landscapes dance with implied motion.
And underlying all of this cacophony, the massive, elemental forms of huge boulders, one of which—Balance Rock—looks like you could just push it and it would roll into the lake.
Xavier University, Cincinnati OH, 2007
About John D. Woolsey: 30 Years of Landscape
Xavier University Art Gallery
Cincinnati, OH
Sept. 21 – Oct. 12, 2007
Studying art at the University of Wisconsin in the 1960s, we were encouraged to be “with it”, which meant paying attention to the art magazines and fitting in with the faculty’s perceptions of what was au courant. For me, that took the form of hard-edge, color-field painting, first using geometrical images and then biomorphic images. By grad school at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 70s. that work had morphed into large organic abstractions painted with air brush on raw canvas, what one of my critics called “ass-holes and belly buttons.”
However, it was at Penn that my critics, the figurative painters Neil Welliver, Alex Katz and Yvonne Jacquette, gave me “permission” to return to landscape, as subject which always spoke to me very clearly. In 1970, representational painting was radical, not reactionary, so I was happy with this turn of events.
This exhibition is with Cincinnati painter, John Stewart. We were high school classmates in Wisconsin where we painted plein air (i.e., working outdoors on-site) watercolors in a smoke-filled car during the cold Wisconsin winters. This exhibition is a survey of some of the themes I have been concerned with over about the past 30 years.
Various elements have been of continued interest to me during my career. This is a brief — but not all-inclusive — list, which will be apparent by viewing the exhibit.
1. Landscape as “abstraction”
My primary interest in landscape is not to tell stories, illustrate pretty scenes, or make political or environmental statements, but as a vehicle for my explorations of color, texture, linear elements and other formal aspects in picture making. These are the vocabulary of pure abstraction, but in representational painting the subject itself intrudes and allows the viewer to participate in much different ways than in abstraction.
Because I want to remove the sense of human interaction from my work, I rarely include any human elements unless they are very abstract (such as the underside of a highway overpass, or a spot of red from a distant building). I have usually chosen to paint landscapes which themselves have a strongly abstract element: the seafloor that is revealed at low tide in Maine, buttes and canyons of the American west, and most recently, collections of monumental glacial erratic boulders in Maine or piles of eroded house-size granite blocks in Joshua Tree National Park in California, which I have been painting as if they were portraits or still-lifes.
2. Theme and variation
I have always worked in series. That model emerged when, at Alex Katz’ suggestion, I started to paint small quick (20–30 minute) paintings in a cemetery near my studio. The notion of a large “masterpiece” has never much interested me. Rather, I am interested in how an idea develops over time and within well-defined constraints. I grew up in a family of scientists. The scientific process of working with one variable at a time to explore a larger issue is one that has always spoken to me, and in a sense, I approach my work like a long series of experiments.
As part of this strategy, I started many years ago painting the same landscape in multiple color situations (like Monet’s paintings of the Rouen Cathedral). That morphed into making etchings and relief etchings which I hand-colored in many variations. After a hiatus of more than 15 years, I recently returned to this activity with a series of hand-colored digital prints.
3. East and west
For the last 30 years I have concentrated my subject choices in Maine, where I have spent partial or whole summers for many years, and the arid west: the Badlands of South Dakota, Utah, New Mexico and Southern California. These are places where the human imprint is minimal, and the landscapes have an other-worldly quality, often with bizarre juxtapositions of colors and forms, or uniquely clear light.
4. Plein air vs. studio
Beginning with the quick paintings mentioned above, I have usually worked by making plein-air studies on site, and then working with them in the studio, either in larger, more tightly controlled versions or as pastiches of several images. This method emerged for two reasons: (1) I found it very difficult to interpret photographic images. They often look clear until one questions what that thing in the middle ground is and whether it is further forward or back from another object. That was never a problem while painting on-site; (2) I liked the challenge of recording what I saw/heard/felt in the 1–3 hours available before the light changed too much. Forced to paint quickly, I was also forced to learn to make decisions quickly and to trust them, something that Alex Katz had taught was essential to “seeing freshly.”
5. Pragmatism
My choice of technique and size has often been a pragmatic decision, based on what would work in the circumstances. Thus, in 1974, when my son was born and I was sharing child-rearing with my artist-wife, Bette, my work became smaller since I had less time and still wanted to cover a lot of ground.
Over the years, I developed a lot of portable painting techniques, since I often sandwiched painting trips together with travels to work with clients in my publishing/science illustration business. Thus, inspired by a series of travel sketches made by Turner on a trip up the Rhine, I started working in gouache on colored papers, a technique that could be packed in the bottom of my carry-on. Inspired by the late post-pointillist paintings of the French artist, Paul Signac, I did a body of work consisting of ink drawings worked into with watercolor. And when I no longer had easy access to an etching press, I started making digital prints from my drawings so that I could explore colored variations of an image.
Phoenix Loft Gallery, Belfast, ME 2003
LANDSCAPE AS PORTRAIT/STILL LIFE/OBJECT
An exhibition of work by John D. Woolsey
at the Phoenix Loft Gallery, Belfast, ME, August 1–30, 2003
Artist’s statement
Landscape has been my subject of choice for the last 30 years, and it is a subject whose depth and variety I continue to be inspired by. During these years, I have thought of landscape primarily as a vehicle for exploring formal issues such as color, the establishment or dissolution of the picture plane, the role of gesture and so forth. In the last several years, I have considered landscape in the light of some of the other great traditions of painting: portrait, still-life and the art object.
When we think of landscape we usually mean a sweeping, broad, context-driven statement. We speak of “the political landscape”, for example, meaning the broad context of politics. Landscape painting as we know it today owes this broad sweep to Claude Lorraine, who first made landscape the subject of his work, rather than the background to another subject, for example the flight into Egypt. The two large canvases in this exhibit, painted in the early 80s and revised this year, are typical of the broad sweeping subjects that I worked on for many years, and continue to work on.
LANDSCAPE AS PORTRAIT
About 10 years ago, I began to paint landscape objects that had such a commanding presence that they stood apart in my mind from that which surrounded them. The first such painting was a “portrait” of an ancient field-grown white pine, now surrounded by forest and seeming out of place. I began to see such objects as worthy of portrait status, becoming the focus of the work, while the other traditional landscape elements supported it, like Renaissance painters used landscapes — sometimes allegorical — to support their paintings of, for example, the Holy Family. In the past five years, these “portrait” paintings have focused on monumental rocks, with their infinitely varied surfaces.
LANDSCAPE AS STILL LIFE
A still life is traditionally a collection of inanimate objects — as opposed to groups of figures or animals — and in French is traditionally know as nature morte, emphasizing the inanimate qualities. Chardin’s kitchen utensils and Cézanne’s apples are prime examples. A still life is almost always arranged on a surface, horizontal or vertical, and the objects in a successful still life engage in a lively visual conversation with one another.
Many years ago, one of my teachers, Paul Georges, was painting amazing (huge!), arresting still lifes of summer vegetables arranged on an outdoor table with the landscape in the background. Aside from his challenging notions of space or lack of it, the image of a still life in the landscape caught my attention. I started to look for “still lifes” within landscape situations, and started to draw collections of glacial erratic boulders arranged on a landscape surface. I have been particularly drawn to such arrangements in contexts that are a bit outside of everyday experience, and in Maine that has often involved working on such subjects on beaches at low tide, where the “still life” objects are draped in fucus, the typical mid-coast seaweed. I have for the past several years, been working periodically in Joshua Tree National Park in southern California, which is particularly rich in material such as this.
LANDSCAPE AS OBJECT
So what happens if you take a landscape element out of the landscape, or turn a landscape element into a landscape?
The first set of objects comprise the mushroom paintings in this exhibit. I became interested in these beautiful objects many years ago, but in the mid-90s, during a wet late summer when mushrooms were particularly plentiful, started collecting, identifying and cataloguing mushrooms from around my house. After keying them out, I selected various specimens and painted them from life, holding them in one hand and painting them in acrylic with the other. I have revised most of these paintings recently, working into them with oil.
The second of objects are the small landscapes on painted on rocks. For many years, I have been interested in paintings on plates or other 3D or semi-3D objects, such as the Italian majolica collection at the Frick Gallery in New York, or plates painted with landscapes — each different — I had seen on display in English country estates. I liked the scale and the notion of a free-standing art object. There is also a long Maine tradition of painting on bracket fungus — woody shelf-like outgrowths on trees in this area — and I have done my share of those, which are mostly fan-shaped, the natural shape of the fungus.
One day, out painting in Maine with my son, I finished my painting before he was ready to stop. I picked up an interesting-shaped flat rock from the ground and started painting on it. I found that I liked the scale, and more than that, the shape of the object on which I painted. I started to consciously do these small works, picking rocks whose shape and surface had relief details that worked with some aspect of the landscape I was looking at. Painting a landscape on a piece of the landscape seemed like a kind of visual “circle” that was particularly satisfying.
John D. Woolsey
Northport, ME
30 July 2003
Nature morte/Paysage drawings, 2002
My early career coincided with an orientation in American art toward formal concerns: color, scale, surface and the act of painting. These found fruition in a body of large nonrepresentational paintings, and then increasingly incorporated landscape elements. I continued to be most inspired by the visual experience of landscape translated into large studio paintings.
About 20 years ago, I started painting smaller, more intimate works, and concentrated much of that work on painting done on location, en plein air. My work became more personal. I found a directness and freshness in this work which I found hard to achieve in the studio.
Another aspect of what has interested me has been sequential imagery — a visual diary — and the concept of theme and variations. Thus, my interest in landscape has focused on intensive periods of activity in a location, picking a subject and exploring it in a series of variations. My recent focus has been individual rocks and rock groups: “portraits” of major beings in the landscape.
Recently, I have stripped away more from this work and am back in the studio again, working on a series of drawings in black, white and often a third color, on gray paper. These drawings are the beginning of an interest I have had in combining elements of landscape and still-life, and thus I call them Nature Morte/Paysage after the traditional French designations of those two genres.
John D. Woolsey
21 February 2002