During the summer of 2024 I became fully obsessed with Japanese woodblock prints. Other than a visit to my old stomping grounds at the MFA Boston and reading a book on what little is known about the life of Utagawa Hiroshige I couldn't then tell you why it was that moment in time that caused my newfound passion. It was especially surprising given that I grew up a train ride from Boston and attended the MFA regularly in my youth and then attended the School of The Museum of Fine Arts while studying for my BFA during which time I spent nearly every day in the museum which has one of the largest collections of Asian art in the west, and arguably the best collection of Ukiyo-e prints regularly on display anywhere in the world.

I think the answer to why I did not have an epiphany twenty years ago and why it so suddenly came upon me seemingly out of the blue is "process". I am a different person now than I was twenty years ago. Back then I was intimidated by complex processes and though I did take courses in Western printmaking methods I was overwhelmed by the technical and mechanical processes involved and felt removed from the final product, compared to painting, which involves direct application onto a substrate. I enjoyed the tactile nature, spontaneity and immediacy of drawing and painting and so I focused much of my art history studies on Chinese ink painting, and to some degree on adjacent Japanese paintings. Though I spent quite a bit of time in Japanese galleries, being rather in awe of the arms, armor, netsuke, and clothing, I had no idea how these objects were made and the level of craftsmanship involved. I had no idea just how different the Japanese woodblock printmaking process was from Western processes.

So there I was in the summer of 2024, two decades later, with two young children, a full time teaching job, and not painting nearly as much as I should have been because painting had become less spontaneous. I lack the time to set up and clean up, and the traditional paints and mediums are quite hazardous, and when painting I am chained to a studio unless painting en plein air which of course takes even more time in a given moment. Enter; Japanese woodblock printing. I can work on design drawings any time and anywhere, I can carve for ten minutes or ten hours and don’t have to even clean up if I’m feeling particularly rushed and I even bring my blocks to friends houses so that I can multi-task having a modicum of a social life while also getting work done and sharing the process with the people I care about, and only the print days require me to have a solid couple of days booked for printing and that is quite do-able. Oh, and the printing process is so tactile, with the water-based pigments being applied with a brush and in such a variety of textures, subtle gradients, and intensities, with impressions being made by hand with a baren.

There are also economic considerations and I don’t mean for me as it is decidedly more difficult to source materials than for painting, but for the collectors. Ukiyo-e rose to prominence during the Edo period as a product for the people, something that the chōnin class could afford and enjoy, something more ephemeral and less grandiose than Nihonga (paintings). Even today, few people can afford original paintings and other singular works due to sheer economics of it, but hand-made prints make original works of art accessible to the masses.

Winter is coming; really it's so cold you could say it is more or less here. Most people dread the winter, but it's one of my favorite seasons because of the low-angle light and subtler colors and tones of the winter landscape in contrast with the vibrant and overt greens and yellows of summer - although I am currently working on a couple of summer-inspired paintings of Shelburne VT.

This coming weekend my painting "The Holdout" will be on display at St. Paul's church in Newburyport during a dedication ceremony. The barn featured in the painting is on a property formerly owned by the Bothwell sisters, life long members of St. Pauls. The church is dedicating a conference room to the sisters and have asked me if I would be willing to show the painting at the dedication and I was happy to oblige.

The following weekend Holly and I will make our annual December trip to Cape Elizabeth / Portland for landscape inspiration and First Friday gallery hopping and holiday shopping and I hope to return with the seeds of many new pieces.

Despite the state of the world and how tense everything has been in a more global sense, 2018 was a very good year for me. Even before my son Maxwell was born in 2017 I had begun to take a hiatus from painting to concentrate more on photography, and after Maxwell was born I took a six month hiatus from creating artwork all together more or less.

After Maxwell's first birthday I began to shift my focus yet again. In order to spend more time with him I began to concentrate less on commercial photography, and refocus myself to being a dad and also painting, which is something I can do during spare moments and at home, instead of spending a lot of valuable weekend time travelling to shoot. I always feel a little guilty having so many interests and shifting gears so often, but this was definitely the right move.

In late spring I was commissioned to complete a painting of the Newburyport Public Library by the library staff, as a gift to their director who would be retiring in August. This project really got me back into the swing of painting.

I had a wonderful summer spent traveling the back roads of New England with Max and Holly and by the end of it I felt recharged and refreshed, ready to go back to school, and ready to get back to painting. During labor day weekend I experienced a major burst of inspiration from photographs I had taken the previous winter, and began creating a series of landscape paintings, which are looser and certainly more relaxing to paint that architecture.

The Columbia Gas emergency certainly caused my painting frenzy to derail, but I'd managed to create several solid paintings, and I was happy with the results.

Two of those paintings, "Marshland Grove" and "Impressions In Snow" went into the Newburyport Art Association's Fall Members Juried Show, juried by Karen Tusinski of Rockport, where the latter won best oil painting in show, a very nice surprise.

Two others, "Frozen Flood" and "Impressions In Snow No. 2" were exhibited in a group show called "Andover" at the Fenn School, in Concord, Massachusetts. "Andover" was curated by my friend and former educator Jonathan Wachs, who now teaches at Fenn, and featured works in a variety of media created by artists who he met during his tenure at Andover Public Schools.

The week before Thanksgiving after seven weeks without gas (no heat, no hot water, no stove) our service was restored and we were able to move home. Then the holiday insanity carried us into the new year, and here we are!

I find myself struggling to get back into the mood to paint as regularly as I was in the fall, but my teaching life has been pretty hectic, and winter can be difficult. Thankfully next week I will be on vacation and hopefully will be able to rest up and muster some artful steam.