BRATTLEBORO — Mitchell-Giddings Fine Arts will host an artist talk with Matt Brown on Saturday, April 21, at 5 p.m.
Brown will discuss his current exhibit “Conversations with Color Woodblock Prints,” on display at Mitchell-Giddings Fine Arts through May 6.
The talk will include a demonstration by Brown of the Japanese hanga method of printmaking used by Hokusai, Kunisada, and Hiroshige, a technique in which each print is created entirely by hand, using water and pigments applied to multiple carved wooden blocks. One woodblock corresponds to one color within a print, and each is transferred to paper by a small hand-held baren.
“Conversations with Color Woodblock Prints” features more than 40 prints, with many new pieces, as well as watercolor and pencil studies, working proofs and progressive states, providing viewers a glimpse into the artist's continuous dialogue with his imagery and materials. Often changes made over several years create subtle, or dramatic, re-imagining of Brown's initial vision.
An art major in college, Brown worked for years as a builder and cabinet maker before coming across a Hiroshige exhibit at Dartmouth College, which inspired him to research the process behind Hiroshige's work.
“Looking back, I see the idea to teach myself hanga came principally from my attraction to the method as watercolor printing,” Brown said in a news release. “The soft quality of these colors, and the juxtaposition of these colors with the clean carved graphic edges of the shapes, is what I love best. But I also love the process of making these prints: the way an image is separated into parts and put back together, the way the translucent colors blend, the way the wood, with water, interacts with the paper.”
Brown's Artist Talk will be filmed by Andy Reichsman of Ames Hill Productions, and will be available to the public through BCTV's film series “MGFA Presents” in the following weeks, as well as on MGFA's website and on BCTV's local Channel 8.