Fall

Gordon Louis Mortensen

"Fall" is a stunning representation of an autumnal landscape. Mortensen captured the mood of season with purple, golds, reds, oranges, and greens. Barren branches suggest the approach of winter, red leaves shimmer in the finality of their life cycle, and grasses turn golden in the cool depths of this woodland scene. Mortensen is a master of the reduction woodcut method carving numerous blocks and using a multiplicity of colors to create a painterly scene that has amazing depth. Fall evokes the coolness of twilight when the lingering sunlight sets the foliage ablaze.

To create this reduction color woodcut Mortensen used 40 colors, printed with 38 separate press runs.

Gordon Mortensen commented on the reduction process he uses: "Only one woodblock is used. On it an image is drawn in India ink. Before the first color is printed, any areas that are to remain unprinted (white or the color of the paper) are cut away from the surface of the block. Then an oil base ink is used to print the first color on all of the sheets of paper that are to be used for the edition and proofs. After the first printing the block is again cut, removing any surface of the block that is to remain of the first color in the finished print. After each subsequent color is printed, the block is cut again, the process continues until the print is finished, and most of surface of the block is cut away."

Born near Arnegard, North Dakota on April 27, 1938, Gordon Mortensen received his BFA degree with Honors in 1964 from the Minneapolis School of Art (now the Minneapolis College of Art and Design) and he was enrolled in the graduate program at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul between 1969 and 1972.

Originally a portrait painter, Mortensen almost entirely abandoned that media for reduction woodcutting, achieving the creative freedom he desired. At the time, he was one of the few practicing artists of this method in the United States. During this transitional time, he taught briefly at the Saint Paul Art Museum, the Rochester Art Center, and the Minnetonka Art Center in Wayzata.

Early in his printmaking career, Mortensen circulated his color woodcuts via exhibitions in the Midwest. His work reached a wider audience in 1976 when he participated in the Brooklyn Museum National Print Exhibition and the following year he joined the Boston Printmakers.

Mortensen's early works have fewer colors and are smaller, but the later woodcuts frequently have from twenty-three to forty-seven colors and can be as large as forty inches plus and wider than thirty inches. This normally requires between twenty and thirty-five passes through the press, taking as much as a month to complete an edition. He has usually printed on Japanese mulberry paper.