Can you share a bit about yourself and your background?
I’m a husband, father and grandfather, currently residing in Pensacola, Florida. I’ve been a full-time artist for the past 22 years. Prior to that, I taught art for 13 years at the high school level. I received my undergraduate and master’s degrees in painting from Trinity University and Eastern Illinois University. In the mid-1990s, I began experimenting with printmaking after seeing the work of the woodcut novelists, Lynd Ward and Frans Masereel. The block print — woodcut and linocut — has been my primary medium for the past 17 or 18 years.
What is block printing and why do you like that technique?
Block printing is an overarching term for wood engraving, woodcut, linocut and vinyl cut. It’s a relief form of printmaking that achieves an image by carving away the negative space with a razor-sharp tool, a gouge or burin. The surface that remains is eventually inked with a brayer (roller), covered with a piece of paper of choice, and run through a printing press. After “pulling the print” (peeling the paper from the surface), the mirror image of the block’s surface is transferred to the paper. A color palette can be achieved by using more than one block or by using a reduction method that utilizes the same block carved and reprinted multiple times. Lastly, if an oil-based ink is used, the print can be painted with watercolor.
I enjoy the bold graphic contrast of the medium. It’s an art form that’s affordable for the commoner. Block printed Bibles and prayer books became accessible in the early 15th century with the invention of the printing press. Prints have also been used as disposable political and social street posters on city walls, as well as fine art in museums.
Two of the predominant subjects of your work are saints (canonized and not) and musicians. Why did those subjects continue to interest you?
I’ve connected with music since I was young. I’d spend hours meditating on the lyrics, or just one line of a song that resonated with me. Popular music is perhaps the poetry of our generation, in the sense that it’s universal and well-known. Whether the lyrics were the intended meaning of the musician or not is not the point, the subversive nature of poetry allows it to speak to me in my experience. When I portray musicians and print their lyrics in my art, it allows me a “voice” to communicate with others as much as the visuals. It’s a gateway, similar to what St. Paul did when quoting the Greek poets.
Creating icons of saints and mystics has been a pursuit of mine since 2013. I initially started the icon series as a response to the Sandy Hook school shootings. As a father of two young daughters, I was devastated by what I had just witnessed. My New Year’s resolution was to create one icon per week that offered a prayer on the theme of light being birthed out of darkness. The project took me on a journey of discovering new prayers and spiritual guides to enlighten my path.
I could have painted or drawn the saints, but the block print medium offered the perfect metaphor. A block printed prior to carving is a black rectangle, or square or whatever shape you start with. As I carve each mark, I’m not only revealing the image but literally carving light out of darkness.
By the end of 2013, I self-published the book, “Light from Darkness: Portraits and Prayers,” which includes all 52 people in that series, along with a hundred or so prayers. All of the proceeds have been donated to orphanages — children who have lost their parents. While the outcome of my efforts doesn’t even put a dent in the evil that was done on that horrific day, this project would never have taken place if it hadn’t happened.
In 2020, I revived the icon series during the COVID-19 lockdown and the George Floyd murder. Again, I looked to the saints and mystics — Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant — for insight navigating life’s difficulties. The desert elders seemed a likely source for the COVID-19 ordeal with their self-imposed exile, while Black Christians who fought for civil rights helped me to envision life from their perspective. It was important that I share their wisdom and spiritual insights with others, so I began to post these icons on an Instagram page called PsalmPrayers.
Lately, I’ve been researching and posting icons of peacemakers from the Christian faith tradition, as well as other religions.
How does the practice of sacred art affect your own spirituality?
The act of making art has become prayer for me, in and of itself. It transcends language. In the silence in my studio, I connect with God through a very meditative and contemplative process. The medium of the block print slows me down and allows me to center my attention, one stroke at a time. It’s still up to me if I want to use that time to engage with God or not but it can be a type of prayer method. The work of creating art and praying doesn’t have to be an either-or proposition. Brother Lawrence once wrote, “When the time comes for work to be done, I just look at God.”
Your most recent book is titled “Everything Could Be a Prayer.” Why did you pick that title?
To be honest, the title was a result of the Broadleaf Publisher’s marketing team. We had a few titles on the table and finally went with this. I believe my initial “working title” was “Imago Dei,” which I knew would be problematic. The title itself comes from a quote by St. Martin de Porres: “Everything, even sweeping, scraping vegetables, weeding a garden and waiting on the sick could be a prayer if it were offered to God.” In light of one of the ways I pray — at my drawing board — this title seemed very appropriate. Broadleaf did a good job!
Have you heard the old maxim “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”? I have quibbles with this … and I’d like to see a dance about architecture. But how do you deal with the built-in limitations of expressing yourself about aural subjects in a visual medium?
That’s a good question. Music and visual art share similar properties: rhythm, pattern, texture and layering, for example. These, you could say, act as the bass line. In music, it’s the percussion and rhythm section, while when used in the visual arts, it can be created through the connection of forms, the flow of line or the repetition of similar shapes. Color and line can offer variety in a composition which becomes the “melody,” or they can also be used in supporting the rhythm section.
When I initially started my blues series, I wanted to create nostalgia. Block printing was used almost exclusively in book illustration, advertisements, posters and record sleeves from the birth of the blues at the beginning of the 20th century, so it was a natural fit. I used black ink on white, actually, black on an amber-colored tobacco paper. I chose to carve most of the blocks with a scratchy style to mirror the scratchiness of the audio that we’ve come to associate with the old 78 records.
When I started doing rock musicians I needed to add color. It was technically more challenging because additional blocks had to be used — layered for each color. I hoped to recreate the silkscreen style of the psychedelic 60s, but still by using block printing.
With the jazz series, I created puzzle-piece blocks for the background that could be inked separately with different colors and then brought back together in a variety of combinations. The warm colors — red, yellow and orange — offer a high energy, while the cool colors — blue, green, and violet — are typically associated with calm. The portrait of the musician would eventually be printed on top of this background. I would make many short-run editions of 18 to 20 and then change it up. Each time I printed a new background, they would be done with different patterns, rhythms and colors to improvise a variation of the “song.”