BRIAN D. COHEN

Two Bridges, 1992, etching

“The process of etching is physical and elemental, requiring force and pressure, inviting aggression and then delicacy, conjoining fire, water, earth, and air. There is something about seeing an image into metal that implies permanence, duration, and enduring presence, a presence I hope will persist in my work.”

PRINTMAKING

Printmaking is Brian D. Cohen’s language, a language he speaks using the century-old techniques and tools of the Renaissance to communicate in a world where images now appear, flicker and evaporate, along with our attention. His unflinching focus memorializes objects, natural phenomena, and ideas—a steel bridge, a wild tree, an angel—but rarely a human form. These images of objects are also Cohen’s conversation with history. He renders obsolete methods of transportation with a reverence for an industrial past, capturing the architectural and engineering artistry of a biplane, ships, zeppelins, steam locomotives, and steel bridges in his art, which itself is made with the antique process of etching, acid, and ink.*

EMBLEMS

Similarly, the emblems—ordinary objects—in their clarity and solitariness become profoundly metaphoric and spiritual: A candle flame floats in the dark, an emblem of both fragility that could be extinguished with a puff of air, and one of hope whose small point of light allows insight. Cohen’s view of a tree is atypical: no rhapsody of leaves, but one of a trunk sinking into the earth. The water he captures in ink of a bend in a river appears to be flowing, reminding us of the miracle of water.*

BROADSIDES

Cohen’s broadsides are collaborative efforts with connections to history. Typically, broadsides published ballads, sensational news, and the printed equivalent of political sound bites for centuries, until telecommunication made broadsides obsolete. Cohen’s work in this form aligns with the current resurgence of broadsides as a method of publishing poetry as fine art. Cohen adds images to accompany—but not illustrate—poems, often those of Vermont Poet Laureate, Chard deNiord. Cohen and deNiord have been publishing books and broadsides of side-by-side prints and poems for over thirty years in what Cohen describes as “a kind of synergistic peripheral vision for each other’s imagery.”*

TAROT

Cohen doesn’t only converse with history; he also collaborates with it. His work is inspired by poets, musicians and artists of the past, and executed with book artists of the present, including type casters, letterpress printers, papermakers, and bookbinders. The Fool’s Journey, his contemporary take on the Tarot deck, includes hand-lettered calligraphy. The Fool’s Journey harkens back to the Tarot’s fifteenth-century origin as a visual guide depicting the transcendent states of human development, best described as the spiritual cycle of life. Cohen’s images evoke Renaissance cosmography—the order of the world—in pictures of the elements updated for a twenty-first sensibility attuned to physics and abstraction.*

ETCHINGS

These etchings show us the beauty of triangles and the curves they support, whether inside a zeppelin or in the arch of a bridge. They also show movement: a zeppelin floats in front of the triangles of the Eiffel Tower, and a locomotive races past a station. While these images honor the industrial age, they do so with an ominous ambiguity, as if a massive locomotive overtaking a smaller one is the harbinger of a future dominated by ever bigger and more powerful machines. But Cohen also counters the palpable peril of a train steaming into a dark tunnel with images that honor connection in the beauty of bridges that stretch across rivers for easy commerce.*

LANDSCAPES

Cohen has an acute sense of place. He scratches many of his landscapes on site in drypoint, capturing an immediate impression, as in Afternoon Landscape, or The Beehive, on Mount Desert Island. Others are etchings made in the studio, allowing for more texture and nuance, as in River, where the water is squeezed between furry, forested riverbanks.*

WATERCOLORS

In his watercolors and in his austere, black and white images, Cohen invites the viewer to slow down, and in slowing down, begin to see. We, the viewers, are the humans who complete the pictures that speak to our humanity and the nature of existence. Cohen’s work helps us to see the beauty of the mechanical world, the endurance of the natural one, and a way to contemplate the contradictions and complexities of human existence that both challenge us and give us comfort and hope.*

* Excerpts from an essay by Deborah Lee Luskin, Brian D. Cohen: A Retrospective, see more here.

Brian D. Cohen is a printmaker, painter, educator, and writer. He graduated from Haverford College and completed his MFA in Painting at the University of Washington. In 1989 he founded Bridge Press to further the association and integration of visual image, original text, and book structure.

As a printmaker, Cohen has shown in over forty individual exhibitions and has participated in over 200 group shows. His books and etchings are held by major private and public collections throughout the country.

Cohen was an art teacher at The Putney School from 1985 until 2020, where he was Dean of Faculty and founding director of The Putney School Summer Programs. In 2001 he helped found Two Rivers Printmaking Studio in White River Junction, Vermont as its artistic director. His teaching experience has also included classes and workshops at schools and studios throughout New England.

Cohen is the illustrator of Reading the Forested Landscape and The Granite Landscape, and has contributed artwork to literary reviews and other publications. His writing on prints, books, and arts education have appeared in print and online journals and magazines.

Cohen lives in Kennebunk, Maine.