{"id":32508,"date":"2016-02-26T20:00:50","date_gmt":"2016-02-27T02:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=32508"},"modified":"2020-02-15T10:07:59","modified_gmt":"2020-02-15T16:07:59","slug":"cultivating-printmaking-in-southern-utah-abraham-mccowan-returns-to-his-roots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/cultivating-printmaking-in-southern-utah-abraham-mccowan-returns-to-his-roots\/","title":{"rendered":"Cultivating Printmaking in Southern Utah: Abraham McCowan Returns to His Roots"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

For the first time since the 1980s, Dixie State University\u2019s art department will be offering an introductory course in printmaking in the fall and adjunct Professor Abraham McCowan has big hopes for what it will mean about the future of printmaking in southern Utah. \u201cI have a lot of non-students wanting to participate,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

In a show at Dixie University\u2019s North Plaza Gallery, the St. George native is currently exhibiting a series of mixed-media drawings, but his real love is printmaking, something he discovered as an undergrad at Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin. He found the attitude toward printmaking in the East markedly different than in the West, particularly Utah.\u00a0 \u201cOut East, printmaking is it<\/em>,\u201d McCowan says. \u201cThey\u2019re nuts about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

McCowan became drawn to woodblock printmaking. The direct nature of the medium as well as the meditative gesture of carving appealed to him. That preference was cemented when he was introduced to printmakers Tom Huck and Karen Kunc at a Southern Graphics Council Conference in 2007. Both were doing large-scale relief printmaking, and McCowan was impressed by Kunc\u2019s work, especially. \u201c[Kunc] changed what I thought was possible in printmaking,\u201d McCowan says.<\/p>\n

For his graduate work, McCowan studied under a student of Kunc, Utah State University Professor Kathy Puzey. She encouraged Mccowan to start working in a larger format, resulting in impressive woodcut prints\u2014some 8 feet long\u2014depicting desert flora of southern Utah and northern Mexico.<\/p>\n

McCowan\u2019s large botanicals, some of which were on exhibit last year at Salt Lake City\u2019s Saltgrass Printmakers, are more expressive than illustrative, and exhibit a curious wonder of the strange and diverse plants of the Sonoran and Mojave deserts. His graphic style has a writhing quality, with the details of the plants embellished and exaggerated by McCowan\u2019s own imagination. \u201cDesert plants, especially in the Sonoran Desert, are animated<\/em>,\u201d McCowan says. \u201cThe saguaros with their arms twisting around each other, the organ pipe cactus\u2026 The desert is a crazy, sacred, beautiful place.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still wanting to work big, but without access to a large press since finishing graduate school, McCowan has turned to mixed-media drawings on paper mounted on wood panels. As we see in the DSU exhibit entitled Thunder Crashing Above Us,<\/em> which also features Cache Valley artist Lisie Beck Brundage, McCowan\u2019s new works are more gestural, more spontaneous. While woodcuts are still present, most are small, almost studies, with a few botanicals floating amid nonobjective works. \u201cThe little woodcuts are informing the big drawings right now, rather than the other way around,\u201d McCowan explains. While he hopes to return to large format printmaking, he feels that the mixed media offers an opportunity to explore mark-making. It will be interesting to see where this experimentation leads when McCowan gets around a large press again.<\/p>\n

It is hard not to think of parallels between the tenacious desert flora that inspire McCowan\u2019s graphic oeuvre and his own perseverance as an advocate of printmaking. Despite a strong tradition of landscape and realism in St. George, McCowan believes there is a need and a place for artists who are outside of that mold, and cited recent efforts by various St. George-area printmakers to network with one another via social media. McCowan is also reaching out to printmakers in Kanab, and will be teaching a relief printmaking workshop and showing at Raven\u2019s Heart Gallery there in the summer. With printmakers coming out of the woodwork, so to speak, Mccowan hopes a printmaking studio will evolve in St. George. \u201cI definitely think we could have something like Saltgrass in St. George,\u201d he says. \u201cTeaching a course on printmaking is a good start.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s hoping his words turn out to be prophetic.<\/p>\n