Matt Brown, Storm on Mt. Moosilauke, 2018

Matt Brown: Conversations with Color Woodblock Prints

March 22 – May 6, 2018
Opening: Thursday, March 22 5-7pm
Artist Talk: Saturday, April 21, 5pm

Inspired by an exhibit of Hiroshige’s “53 Stations of the Tokaido” at nearby Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum, I began experiments with color woodblock printing using the hanga method in January of 1993. First practiced in this country by Arthur Dow and others as part of the Arts and Craft movement at the beginning of the 20th century, hanga is printing with water entirely by hand using brushes to apply pigments to the blocks and a hand-held baren as a press. It is the same method used to make the ukiyo-e prints of Hokusai, Hiroshige, and Kunisada.

I have made printmaking my full-time work and have been a juried member of the League of NH Craftsmen since 1995. I love the process of making these prints, the way pictorial simplicity is encouraged, the way an image is separated into parts and put back together, the way the translucent colors blend and juxtapose, the way the wood interacts with the paper. I am interested in exploring through this inherently flat medium issues of pictorial space and in the dynamics of how we perceive color.