I am mesmerized by line... curved, crooked and cross-hatched. To use it, and it alone, to condense our chaotic, colorful world into pure black and white grace is one of the great tests of artistic ability. I stand in awe of the exquisite draughtsmen of history, in particular Daumier, Durer, Tenniel, Toulouse Lautrec, and Rembrandt. By studying them I was drawn into the world of printmaking. Each of them had sought a way to preserve their renderings in multiple copies or versions. Their mediums were lithography, woodcut, wood engraving and etching respectively. Having worked with all of those techniques at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (M.A.), I have decided on woodcuts as the most emphatic, portable and physical of mediums... it is also the least forgiving.

I carve cherry or birch blocks with 'V' and 'U' gouges to leave a raised image. Ink is rolled across the surface. Then Japanese rice paper is overlaid and burnished to transfer a mirror image of the pattern of line. Revisions can only be made by removing wood (adding white) so the process goes forward in painstaking stages of printing and viewing proofs followed by additional cutting. The finished piece is offered only in a small, hand printed, numbered edition.

Over the past twenty years I have moved my studio from Madison to Boston to San Francisco to Aspen and back again to San Francisco. I've also traveled to India, Nepal, Bali, Java and Central America to see woodcuts created for religious icons, fabric patterns and revolutionary art. My work has appeared in the Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, San Francisco Chronicle and Bay Guardian. Regional and national magazines have commissioned my work. Four books have been published featuring my illustrations, including the limited edition, One of the Missing, an Ambrose Bierce short story collection produced by Yolla Bolly Press.

The muses, Satire and Beauty, have inspired a body of work that veers from harshness to grace reflecting my own impatience with the imperfect and appreciation for the sublime.

David Page