Why is the human figure almost totally absent from my woodcuts? And why do I devote so much attention to trees, plants, and animals?
My art school training was strictly academic, and my interest at that time was in the human figure. I worked strictly from a model. I liked character portraiture, and this new country and its people made a great impression on me.
My art school training was strictly academic, and my interest at that time was in the human figure. I worked strictly from a model. I liked character portraiture, and this new country and its people made a great impression on me.
But how could I approach these people when I had neither money to offer them for posing nor sufficient English to explain to them what was on my mind? I also tried to sketch people in parks and public squares. Tomkins Square was a gold mine for artists, a real portrait gallery of all possible types and characters. I tried as much as possible to sketch these people discreetly. It is a paradox that in big cities where so many live, it is almost impossible to find contact with people. The artist has to go to nature or to lock himself within his inner abstract thought. This was my dilemma, the main problem I was confronted with. For several years I could not decide between these two alternatives.
Turning gradually to nature, I realized that there were no real alternatives. A work of art incorporates both alternatives: real and abstract. Only the degree of them changes, and the accent on them is constantly shifting with time.
There is another reason why the human figure was becoming secondary in my woodcuts. My experiments in painting and in printmaking, which came as a result of my crisis, were mostly of a formal nature.
Turning gradually to nature, I realized that there were no real alternatives. A work of art incorporates both alternatives: real and abstract. Only the degree of them changes, and the accent on them is constantly shifting with time.
There is another reason why the human figure was becoming secondary in my woodcuts. My experiments in painting and in printmaking, which came as a result of my crisis, were mostly of a formal nature.
At that time, even if I used the human figure, I treated it as a faceless form. To a certain degree this can be seen in my 1960 woodcut Bronx Express, which was taking me to the Bronx Zoo and to the Botanical Gardens. Here in nature, I was not confronted with so many of the problems I faced with human models. The more I went, the more I felt at home. If the inhabitants of the zoo could still at times show their tempers, forcing the artist to wait until they were willing to stay still, trees were almost ideal models. The artist could find a complete harmony with them that only rain and strong winds could interrupt.It is possible that trees and animals were originally only a substitute for the human figure, and I turned to them when I realized the difficulties of obtaining human models. But if trees, plants and animals were originally only my second love, I found so much beauty in them, that they became my first.
