CURT CARPENTER

ASPEN PRINTMAKER

I live and work in Aspen, Colorado, a town surrounded by the Elk Mountain Range, magnificent country

that is the inspiration for my landscape woodcuts.

 

Working with just black

and gray, I look for strong, unexpected compositions with dramatic contrasts,

like bright snow with long shadows, whitewater against dark rock,

a black, star-filled sky,

moonlight on a distance

corniced ridge.

 

The prints start life as ink and wash drawings made

in a small sketchbook

I carry on my daily walks.

 

These drawings are enlarged, redrawn, pinned up on the studio wall,

and the good ones later become woodcuts.

 

The challenge for me

 is to make sense of the landscape with only

flat shapes and hard edges.

 

The woodcuts are carved

on birch-veneer plywood

(I also use a wire brush to bring out the wood grain),

printed on Japanese washi paper with oil-based inks, run through a hand press, and then signed and numbered in limited editions.

 

—CURT CARPENTER

January 2026

 

 

 

 

"With the powerful simplicity, the rough naïveté, and the often angular awkwardness that the technique brings with it, there's also a peculiar mixture of roughness

and tenderness,

of energy and dreaminess,

that has nowhere found clearer expression

than in the creation

of the woodcut."

 

—MAX OSBORN,

Der Holzschnitt

(The Woodcut)

Bielefeld: Velhagen & Klasing.

Leipzig, Germany 1903