Project #1 Proposal: Rachel Spielberg

For my first woodblock print I would like to use the same artist that I used last semester in Drawing as my reference/inspiration – P.J. DeVilliers. What I still love about his work in terms of style is that it has a sort of fantastic, whimsical quality, while retaining a sense of realism. That is to say, all of the images look believable and realistic in a way, despite the fact that the proportions are off and the work sometimes contains images of things that could never really happen. I think DeVilliers makes excellent use of line in his drawings/prints, which would be good to refer to when I design my own print to carve. He uses thicker lines to differentiate between areas of space, or pieces of the composition. Then, within those areas differentiated by the thicker lines, he uses more fine lines and creates different patterns and strokes to give those chunks of space texture and dimension. I also like his use of negative space; if there is any, the viewer doesn’t recognize it as negative space because it is so important to the composition. Every piece of the composition is filled with some kind of texture, created by patterns and lines and decorative swirls or dots, and some of them pop forward because they are bolder, while others drop back in space because they are less sharp. In this way, DeVilliers is even able to create a sense of form, or 3-dimensionality. I will try to use some of these techniques in my own image to hopefully achieve a similar effect.

Just as DeVilliers’ work is often filled with different wild animals, I would like to include an animal (or animals) in my work. But instead of a wild animal, I might like to make the print of my pet parrot, or one of my dogs, perhaps with the quilt on my bed as a backdrop, so I could have a lot of different textures in the background. Alternatively, I could possibly do a wildlife scene, but instead of owls and monkeys like in DeVilliers work, I would like to make it an underwater scene. He also includes fish in his work sometimes, so I could get ideas on how to handle the water and the fish from those works, and in my underwater scene I would probably want to include other more unusual animals like a crocodile or an octopus. Because those creatures are not as common as fish, I could have a lot of fun creating the texture of their scales or tentacles/suction cups in my print. If I don’t end up including any animals at all, the picture will still contain something nature-y, like trees and plants and bushes. I think wildlife would be much easier and better suited for the subject of a print than something man-made, like a building or piece of machinery, because there are lots of interesting patterns in nature that I could use as the basis for the different textures I hope to create. For example, the bark on trees and the blades of grass each have their own distinct shapes, which would translate nicely and be easy to differentiate in a woodblock print.

(Below are some examples I found of DeVillier's work which I would like to model my own style after...)