Richard York, artist and printmaker, has works in numerous private, public, and corporate collections across North America, Europe, and Asia. Represented by the Mira Godard Gallery since 2016, his small-edition reduction woodcuts and linocuts combine representation, abstraction, texture, and colour into painterly prints that reflect the uneasy and often tense boundaries between natural and man-made landscapes. An early interest in woodcuts led York to begin printmaking as a teenager. Born in Wisconsin in 1955 and raised in California, he moved to Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, in 2009. There, he opened Studio 2901, a studio/gallery where he continues to work today.
Project:
My goal with the residency is to continue expanding the stylistic boundaries of a painterly woodcut—first, to further explore the modernist Canadian landscape, and second, to examine the connection between the mid-century St. Ives, Cornwall artists and Canada’s Painters 11 through abstraction inspired by the landscape. Through photos, sketches, watercolours, and a series of completed "St. Ives" reduction woodcuts, I will be able to demonstrate my process from concept to finished work. For the past fifteen years in my studio on Salt Spring Island, I have been exploring and refining my understanding of what a painterly woodcut might look like. My basic definition is a colour reduction woodcut with the nuance, complexity, and significance of a painting. In the 21st century, a "painting" has come to encompass many diverse artistic approaches—so too can a painterly woodcut. Since this idea of a painterly woodcut hasn’t been widely explored, I have had to define its appearance for myself.
The woodcuts in my recent The West Wind show at the Mira Godard Gallery were the culmination of one "painterly" path I followed—a thought experiment that asked the question: "What if Tom Thomson had made woodcuts between 1914 and 1917? What might they have looked like?" The fourteen large colour reduction woodcuts used Thomson’s sketches as a starting point to explore carved brushstrokes, hard and soft edges, and Post-Impressionist colour palettes, along with the handling of both paint and ink. Thomson, one of my favourite Canadian painters, inspired me to understand how all these elements could work together in a single type of painterly woodcut. However, this body of work represented just one possible direction I wanted to explore.
This summer, I spent part of June in St. Mawes and St. Ives, Cornwall. For a few years, I had wanted to incorporate abstract woodcuts into the Painterly Woodcut theme, but the schedule and demands of the Thomson show had put that on hold. This autumn, I decided to explore where this new direction might lead. The art produced in St. Ives after the Second World War used the Cornish landscape as a starting point. The imagery was simplified and abstracted to a point where the work felt vaguely familiar, yet startlingly new. Since the majority of my work has focused on the Canadian landscape—primarily British Columbia and the Gulf Islands—the process of the St. Ives artists intrigued me. There were clear parallels between our respective subject matters. I had pursued something similar in a small series of Tafoni (eroded sandstone) prints that I have made over the past ten years.
The St. Ives prints I created upon returning to my studio in August fully embraced the St. Ives ideology. This “landscape abstraction” serves as the foundation for my St. Ives woodcuts and the work I hope to create in New Brunswick.