Summer greetings to all. This June, I was invited by the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA to create a wood block print to benefit the center. I worked with master printer Andrew Mockler from Jungle Press Editions. Provincetown, for a long time, has been an amazing nexus of creative personalities. I was staying in the barn where Helen Frankenthalerand Robert Motherwell painted in the 1940s. Eugene O’Neil‘s early plays were produced by the Provincetown Players. And Hans Hofmann taught at his famous summer art school there for many summers. Amid all this rich history, a group of artists, mostly women, created a unique form of color wood cut prints in Provincetown. My favorite of these artists was Blanche Lazzell (1878-1956). She was a great artist not widely known outside the world of printmaking and she was also a true bohemian spirit.
Andrew and I researched white line woodcuts, and he devised a contemporary technique to replicate them using one wood block, inked with various colors, run only once through the press. Consistent with my current studio explorations, I selected for the image a single aloe plant, vigorous and upstanding, succulent but armored. Over our work time there, we created the block and proofed many color variants utilizing the same single woodblock, of which these are two of our favorites. Once editioned, the prints will be available from junglepress.com.
succulent
Oxbow School Spring Visiting Artist Lecture Series: Robert Kushner /
Robert Kushner
Tuesday, March 22, 7pm
Visiting Artist Lecture
Oxbow School, Napa, CA
Robert Kushner, Large Succulent Garden, 2014, oil and acrylic on joined paper, 54 3/4 x 33 1/2 inches
Since participating in the early years of the Pattern and Decoration Movement in the 1970’s, Robert Kushner has continued to address controversial issues involving decoration. Kushner draws from a unique range of influences, and his work combines organic representational elements with abstracted geometric forms in a way that is both decorative and modernist. He has said, “Decoration, an abjectly pejorative dismissal for many, is a very big, somewhat defiant declaration for me . . . . The eye can wander, the mind think unencumbered through visual realms that are expansively and emotionally rich. Decoration has always had its own agenda, the sincere and unabashed offering of pleasure and solace.” On his collages specifically, Kushner writes: “I want to make [my pieces] as diffused and confusing as possible. I want the viewer to time travel as broadly as possible. And so I include papers from as many languages, cultures, times, and places as I can which become a part of the content of the work. In all likelihood no one individual could read all the languages in each collage. Instead of concrete cognition we arrive at a mist of unknowing.”
Kushner’s work has been exhibited extensively in the United States, Europe, and Japan and has been included three times in the Whitney Biennial and twice at the Biennale in Venice. He was the subject of solo exhibitions at both the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Brooklyn Museum. A mid-career retrospective of his work was organized by the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art. Kushner’s works are included in many prominent public collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; National Gallery of Art, DC; Corcoran Gallery of Art, DC; Tate Gallery, London; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu; Denver Art Museum; Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence; J. Paul Getty Trust, Los Angeles; Museum Ludwig, St. Petersburg; and Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Image: Robert Kushner, Large Succulent Garden, 2014, oil and acrylic on joined paper, 54 3/4 x 33 1/2 inches