Woodblock Print Exhibition

[Jul-Oct]

Capturing the beauty of the California coast through exquisite woodcut prints and prose, "California’s Wild Edge: The Coast in Prints, Poetry, and History" is a new traveling exhibition on display at the Grace Hudson Museum from Saturday, July 8 to Sunday, October 8, 2017. A special free preview reception will take place on Friday, July 7 from 5 to 8 p.m. as part of Ukiah’s First Fridays Art Walk. The exhibition features artist Tom Killion’s Japanese-style woodcut prints, which vividly portray the coast’s ever-changing moods and diverse formations. From Mendocino to Santa Monica, Killion’s work colorfully captures the meeting of land and sea. To provide context for his work, also on view are select traditional Japanese woodblock prints by renowned printmaker Hiroshige, whose style influenced Killion. Several of these traditional prints were once owned by architect and avid Japanese print collector, Frank Lloyd Wright.

Further deepening the experience are complementary writings by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary Snyder, carefully chosen to provide a rich history of the coast through poetry and prose. Other stirring perspectives on the California coastline come from Native Californian traditional stories, accounts of travelers, and poems by past and present California writers, including Robinson Jeffers, Robert Hass, Jane Hirshfield, and Jaime de Angulo.

California-born artist Tom Killion is well known for his four decades of work in the medium of woodcut printmaking. Killion uses Japanese carving tools, papers, and his own adaptation of the traditional key-block process to create relief prints of his landscapes. Killion currently resides in Point Reyes, California and in collaboration with poet Gary Snyder released his newest text, also entitled "California’s Wild Edge: The Coast in Prints, Poetry, and History," through Heyday Books in the summer of 2015.