Woodcuts by Andrea Rich at Stripe

 I first became inter­ested in wood­cut prints as a stu­dent at the Uni­ver­sity of Wis­con­sin in 1971 when I was intro­duced to Japan­ese Ukiyo-e prints. Their ele­gant com­po­si­tions and intri­cate sur­face tex­tures inspired me to explore the medium's many pos­si­bil­i­ties for design.  

Wood­cuts can be bold or sub­tle, crude or refined. The process of cut­ting the blocks has never ceased to delight me. I cut my blocks using cherry ply­wood. I may carve six to twenty blocks for one final image. Printed on ori­en­tal paper, the edi­tions are most often runs of thirty or less.

Print­mak­ing works for me because it slows me down and makes me have to con­sciously decide what I am putting in as well as what I am leav­ing out. Like a sculp­tor I cut away what is unnec­es­sary and am left with an image, clear and strong like the ani­mals I por­tray.  

Life in all its diverse forms hold great inter­est for me. Ini­tially my prints focused closely on indi­vid­ual birds and ani­mals. I always strive to show them as true indi­vid­u­als. I became per­son­ally involved with Native Ani­mal Res­cue on the

Mon­terey Bay and stud­ied many of the ani­mals we reha­bil­i­tated. With the pass­ing of time I find myself need­ing to put these indi­vid­u­als into con­text, that is, into their nat­ural habi­tats. It is only in the wild that they are truly able to be them­selves. A tiger viewed in a zoo is a  mag­nif­i­cent crea­ture, but seen stalk­ing its prey or leap­ing into a river, using its bal­ance, its senses, blend­ing into its envi­ron­ment, this is when a tiger expresses itself.

Unfor­tu­nately for us all, oppor­tu­ni­ties to observe wildlife in the field are becom­ing increas­ingly rare. As habi­tat is destroyed at an ever increas­ing rate year after year, it may one day be more than rare, it may become impos­si­ble. I sin­cerely hope that never hap­pens and I am co­mit­ted to doing what I can to prevent it.