#2

Sandy Walker

In her essay for the catalogue Sandy Walker Woodblock Prints produced for an exhibition of the same title, Katy Kline elucidates Walker’s choice of medium and subject: His woodblock prints bring together in a particularly fertile symbiosis the life forces of the artist, his subject and his materials. The wooden block is itself a piece of nature. Its grain constitutes a record of the flow and swell of many years and is emblematic of the underlying rhythms of the natural world. Like many earlier and often Romantic artists, Walker venerates the tree as a potent totem of independent grandeur. He is aware, however, of the poignant irony by which a tree has been sacrificed to furnish both his block and the paper on which he prints.