Denver fine artist and printmaker Leon Loughridge’s inner visual landscape arose growing up in the rugged environment of Northern New Mexico, where his grandmother reveled in artistic circles. “That early exposure really helped develop my sense and feel for art,” he says. “Art was a great outlet for me as a child. And we spent hours roaming the countryside. The rule was you must be back for dinner. You end up with this deep appreciation for the environment. When I’m in the studio, working on an image, that all comes back to me. I’m always trying to convey my relationship with what I have experienced out there.”
Loughridge attended the Colorado Institute of Art when John Jellicoe was director and bringing in a lot of fine artists. Later stationed with the army in Germany for three years in the 1970s, he traveled throughout Europe. “I did a study program with a German artist on Old Masters’ techniques and became interested in printmaking.”
Back in Colorado, Loughridge began printmaking in a home studio while working for a newspaper doing layout and paste-up. In 1998 he purchased his first letterpress and received immediate recognition for his woodblock prints, which have been exhibited nationally and collected by multiple museums. He and his wife also own a gilding business, Dry Creek Gold Leaf, producing and restoring hand-carved, gold-leaf frames.
The woodblock prints that have carved his reputation and garnered critical acclaim begin as quickly rendered watercolors painted outdoors. “As you’re sketching outdoors there’s this spontaneous reaction to what you’re seeing in front of you. The challenge is to then capture that in the woodblock. My family’s from Denver so I’m a third-generation Coloradoan. We have a very old cabin below Mount Evans that we are striving to save. We go up there on the weekends and hide away. I go hiking with my watercolor kit and pad — I call it my traveling studio — and I’m ready to sketch. When the rain showers start I close it up and run.”
In the studio, Loughridge references the sketches as a kind of roadmap. “They’re telling me what color schemes, what values to use, the compositional arrangements I responded to. The key then is to somehow instill in that woodblock some of that quick work that happened while I was sketching. Because as you’re sketching, there are distortions in the scene. You’ll see something that seems so important and unconsciously exaggerate it, which creates this emotional relationship and impact.”
The challenge comes in transferring that present, fresh awareness to the intrinsically cumbersome process of printmaking. Loughridge uses some unorthodox printing methods that combine historical and cultural techniques, picking and choosing among them to see what works best to distill the unique qualities of the Western and Southwestern terrain that so enthrall him. Currently working on an upcoming exhibit of large woodblocks for the Breckenridge Gallery, he conducts watercolor sketching expeditions in the surrounding mountains.
“I leave early and go out to an area and wander around until something catches my eye or I react to a scene. I get a large sketch or two and come back and tack them on the wall to see if they’re going to make the cut. This one I’m working on is of the Ten Mile Range in winter. I have a watercolor sketch I did so now it’s about translating that into the woodblock process.”
Woodblocks evolve slowly, the artist says, and involve multiple layers. He again points to his work in progress. “Just to build the luminosity in the sky has taken five color runs,” he says of a current print. “They’re very thin, transparent colors. Once the sky is done I can start building other areas in the composition. I usually work light to dark so the sky and background come first. There’s a lot of snow in the foreground here so I’ll start by building the warm glow in that.”
Large woodblocks can take a couple of months to print, and preparing for most shows takes at least eight and requires enormous patience. To relieve the tedium and enliven the journey, Loughridge creates small woodblock studies. “I just attack them with reckless abandon, slapping color on, cutting away, letting things happen. I’m trying to make all the mistakes on the little woodblocks before I get to the big ones.”
The approach delivers occasional epiphanies. “On this one I figured I can print the sky in two layers and get a much more luminous quality than if I printed it in one. So I’m patient, but I like to see things move along so when I become impatient, I’ll do a woodblock study and get it out of my system. Some of those woodblock studies really sparkle and some go right into the circular bin.”
Along the way every color is hand-inked and the artist uses a reduction technique that harkens back to earlier eras. “In relief printing, the raised areas of a block receive the ink and are printed. The areas that do not print are carved away. Traditionally a multi-color woodblock has a block for each color. In making reduction woodblocks, I’m reducing the block in between each color by carving away. The benefit is that it becomes very creative.” The drawback? “The minute I carve away on the block after the first color run, I cannot reprint it. So when the edition is all printed I go through and count how many good prints there are and that’s the total number in the edition. Sometimes it all just falls together and sometimes the debate is more who’s going to win: me or the woodblock?”
Reduction printing originated in China a thousand years ago, Loughridge says, and became popular during the Arts and Crafts movement at the end of the nineteenth century, a movement that greatly influences him, particularly as expressed through the work of Arthur Wesley Dow. Loughridge is also informed by Japanese prints. “I love their transparent quality. I print with very transparent glazes, always letting the under color show through, which is very similar to the outdoor watercolor sketches I do.”
Some years ago Loughridge founded the publishing company, Dry Creek Art Press, and began working with poets to illustrate their work and produce hand-bound books in very small editions. “The process of putting a book together — from working with the poet, carving all the woodblocks, doing the layout, hand-printing all the images — takes about a year. It’s fun, exciting and a different way to present my artwork. When there’s a book release, it usually sells out immediately.”
Loughridge has been teaming up with Santa Fe poet, John Macker, enabling him to once more immerse himself in the unique sensibility of Northern New Mexico that first captivated him and continues to inspire. “The next book of poetry and woodblocks we’re now working on is about the Rio Grande Gorge. We work really well together in that we choose a theme and sites and have very similar thoughts about the environment and how we react to it. Then he goes off in his direction and I go off in mine and it’s astounding how well they mesh. His poetry and verbal imagery is so very evocative. A bit edgy and a bit rough, a lot like the countryside itself.”
For more information on Leon Loughridge, go to dcartpress.com
