Making Impressions

Reverence by Julie Williams won Honorable Mention in the Impressions: The Art of the Print exhibit.

Congratulations to one of our long-time artists at Arizona Handmade Gallery - Julie Williams!  Julie's work is currently being shown in Impressions: The Art of the Print, a statewide juried exhibit at Tubac Center of the Arts celebrating the diverse medium of printmaking.

Having studied printmaking for seventeen years, Julie specializes in color reduction woodcuts - a time-intensive art requiring an intuitive understanding of positive and negative space. To create a reduction woodcut, Julie begins with a flat piece of shina wood and begins carving an image into it. When she feels it is ready for the first layer of color (usually the lightest), she rolls the block with inks she has mixed herself and and runs it through a press on as many pieces of paper as she wishes to print in an edition - most commonly between 10 and 25. Those pieces of paper are set out to dry while Julie goes back to that original block of wood and begins carving it again until it's ready for the next color. The printing process is repeated on those same pages so that an image is created by adding layers of color on top of each other. Reduction woodcuts are often recognized for the 3-D quality formed from those layers, depth being found through careful consideration of where to place highlights as more material is removed from the block of wood.

Julie's woodcut, Reverence, was awarded Honorable Mention at the Impressions exhibit. It portrays a Bristlecone Pine - a tree many southwest hikers will recognize and appreciate. Famous for their longevity and resilience, some Bristlecones have been alive for over 5,000 years, thriving in  the harshest conditions of the American west where most other trees can't survive. The tree Julie depicted  in Reverence is almost 1,700 years old, watching over the quiet of Spectra Point in Cedar Breaks National Monument. Also on display in Impressions are Julie's prints These Days and Cinder Cone - two woodcuts which portray landscapes close to Flagstaff that will strike a nostalgic chord in anyone who has explored the area northeast of town around Sunset Crater or Wupatki National Monuments. 

Julie's woodcuts have been included in many juried national print exhibitions, including Boston Printmakers and Los Angeles Printmakers. Most recently before the Impressions exhibit, she participated in The Arizona Print Invitational in Tucson held at Davis Dominguez Gallery and the Night Visions exhibit at the Coconino Center for the Arts. The Impressions exhibit is open to the public in Tubac through April 4, 2021; a digital tour as well as more information can be found at the Tubac Center of the Arts website. Julie's three prints in the show can be purchased at our online store or in the gallery at 20 N San Francisco St in Flagstaff.