print share - paula winchester

When 40 Nelson Atkins print society members got together to share a print that meant something to each of us,







STORIES opened up, and it got exciting in the Creative Cafe of the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art. 


Member Paula Winchester spoke about visiting her son in Portland and shared her wood engraving by Paul Gentry. Double click on images to enlarge.

Three minutes. 

Paula shared:

"This is a little bit that I know about this person. Paul Gentry. He lives in Portland, Oregon. My son also lives there and works at Nike World headquarters. So I tried to find him, but I was only traveling by mass transit and he was beyond where I could travel."

"But (Gentry) he calls himself a wood engraver. And he started in 2001, so he hasn't been doing this for very long. And wood engraving, this is for me to know as long as you don't know as well, is different from woodcuts, in that they are made on blocks of "end grain hardwood" rather than the face of a board. He also makes his own boards. So this harder surface allows one to cut a very fine design with engraving tools."

"He lives in the Willamette Valley, and he has become over time, basically he is a pictorial realistic division. And he loves the land, and that which he lives in. So his artwork is going to be things that appeal to me. And I like landscapes and things having to do with nature."

"To produce a print usually takes several weeks of work. He usually does not do much more than thirty-five prints. He fabricates these blocks themselves from pieces of eastern maple which are glued together and then carefully milled and sanded. And then the interesting thing is that when he does these prints he uses a "bamboo rice spoon" which he gets from the kitchen. The bamboo rice spoon is his burnishing tool to get it pressed into the print."

  

"That's about what I know. I know the American Legacy Gallery still has these things. And there was this rather nice one that I thought was really cool that had trees, cows, and horses. And (Gentry) he also did one that the American Legacy Gallery picked to be a part of the Print Crawl last year. One that he had that I thought was really cool, and that was not nature-oriented, but... if you have ever been to Portland, it has ridge after ridge after ridge after ridge, and it was like looking through ridges underneath the bridges and there was a person walking." 
         

John Mallery: That one was actually called "Shadows and Steel" and it is actually in the Nelson collection.

Marilyn Carbonell: The Nelson has three of them. Three Paul Gentries.

Steve Pruitt: And why, why do they have three Paul Gentries, Marilyn?

Marilyn Carbonell: Someone donated.

"Reflections At Ankeny" by Paul Gentry, wood engraving

Paula Winchester is a member of the Nelson Atkins Print Society. Her website is http://www.paulawinchester.com/. More on Winchester's experimenting with monoprints, click http://spotlightkcprint.blogspot.com/2013/03/paula-winchester-kc-printmaker.html