January 3, 2024 - January 30, 2024 Telluride Arts features: Henrik Haaland.
Telluride Arts HQ West is featuring Ridgway based artist Henrik Haaland for the first comprehensive show of his graphic woodcuts. Henrik brings years of printmaking, painting experience, and a startling vision of nuance and scale in his series of large-format, single-block woodcuts. His style has developed through the “marriage between the given and imposed." After accepting the dictates of organic pine wood grain patterns, he creates a series of imposed patterns through cuts and marks. The resulting image competes with the natural surface texture of the wood. His subject matter is also a duality between two worlds: the recognizable features of Colorado's Cimarron Mountains, rural eastern Dutchess County, New York, and Western Connecticut—his boyhood home—and the more abstract world of patterns and marks.
Each woodcut is designed and drawn in reverse on large-scale, hand-crafted woodblock. In order to maintain the image's texture, Haaland removes the softer pulp between the heavier wood grain. He enjoys the physicality of burnishing and hand-pulling the prints rather than using a press. The process makes each numbered piece essentially a monoprint, since the act of hand transferring the image results in a unique impression each time. The total effect is not only dramatic, it is singular. His series includes several woodcuts featuring the Telluride Area, including the San Juan and Cimarron Mountains.
Art Walk Reception: January 4th, 5-8PM