Woodcut

Product Information

Redefining the traditional woodcut, Connecticut-based artist Bryan Nash Gill creates exquisitely detailed largescale relief prints of cut trees. BNG: I had a studio in New York City for a summer and had exhausted the money I received from a California drawing fellowship grant. Some of his other sculptures include Twins (2000), a bronze cast of two conjoined saplings, and Blow Down (2002), a skinned and flattened spruce tree mounted on a wall. I wasn’t to far from where I grew up and there was lots of space where I could continue my studio work.

The results are colored, nuanced shapes-mesmerizing impressions of the structural integrity hidden inside each tree. Present on the international art scene in private and public collections, he exhibits regularly in numerous galleries in the United States.Gill has received two Connecticut Individual Artist Grants, is a California Arts Council Fellow and in 2005 he received the Artist Resource Trust, from the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation. He was a fellow of the California Arts Council and twice received grants from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts.

Gill's work has been displayed at the New Britain Museum of American Art and DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, and he was commissioned to create installations for Expo 2005 in Japan and the World Financial Center in New York.Looking closely at an individual tree’s structure and annual rings teach us about a particular species, the environment in which it grew and the occasional marks therein indicating invasive trauma. Most of his woodcuts were created from dead or damaged tree parts that he collected and took to his studio to prepare cross-sections of the wood for relief printing. Although Gill began his art career in glassblowing, ceramics and landscape drawing, he gradually turned to sculpture. The connection to nature is stronger than if he just drew this image as nature has been used to create it and I definitely feel that when I look at his work. It was so dense and the annual growth rings were so close together that they could not be accurately counted beyond two hundred.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. He is printing over a period of time and you can see and feel the slight changes in the texture or mushrooms growing on it.

The prints are beautiful, the paper is a nice weight, they’re large and allow for a lot of writing, there is also a blurb on the back of each card. Bryan Nash Gill is Best Known for his prints taken from tree trunks/logs, capturing all the detail of the pieces of wood including the inner rings and outer bark layers. The footprint of the studio is about 2800 square feet and has a large garage door for moving large sculptures in and out and opens up to a big field where we can watch the wild life. Gill found that things were more beautiful and complex inside than what was visible from the outside.

The nature and trees around him have always been an creational source for him, not only are they beautiful from the outside at but also when you try to investigate a look inside. I was drawn to the different sizes of logs and tree cuts he uses to print from and how much detail he encapsulates into the result. He created prints from a large variety of trees, of which the oldest was a fallen 200-year-old chestnut tree once planted by Frederick Law Olmsted.

He was profiled in Martha Stewart Living in 2012 and was the focus of a documentary video produced by the magazine.