Gary James
aka "Spook"
Woodblocks
And Other Visual Horrors
1 - 10 August 2024
The history of Woodblock printmaking is robust, and the formal structure has remained constant over many centuries – but as the art-form has migrated over land and sea in its various forms - originally from both India and China, it has necessarily changed, due in part to varying cultural distinctions, allowing for regional adaptation, but more importantly because the texture and density of wood changes depending on the local climate - and this in turn prompts alternative approaches to carving.
Gary James has been working with Woodcut for decades now – and has developed a “signature” approach to carving these hand-coloured prints, responding symbiotically with the structure and grain of the wood.
These prints – forming two series, take us firstly on a subterranean adventure encountering gigantic escargots from the time of mammoths’ woolly in “Coco and the Palaeolithic Cave” – then followed by a return to Spook’s Tarcutta, the mid-way point between Melbourne and Sydney on the once horrendous Hume Highway – still a favoured truck-stop in that hallucinatory space between Holbrook’s land-locked submarines and the Yass triple by-pass to Canberra.
Happily, for us, the continuing evolvement of the Woodcut is safely assured, whilst nurtured by the hands and minds of abundantly inventive creators such as Gary James.
