I bought two artworks at the Lakefront Festival of the Arts this year, and only after getting them home did I realize that both of them appealed to me because they looked as if they came out of books.
The friends I went with and I both fell in love with Nick Wroblewski‘s woodcuts at first sight. My photo is a little blurry, and you can see much better renditions of his work at the artist’s website.
What first appealed to me about this print was its atmosphere. It reminds me of snowy nights in Canada – in particular, of a night we drove across Saskatchewan in midwinter, with the Northern Lights going crazy across the sky. The little birds, cheerful in spite of that cold darkness around them, remind me of so many winter sparrows I’ve seen.
But mainly, the woodblock style reminded me of books from the teens to thirties. I’d seen art like it on and between the covers of so many old books containing stories about people and the land. They were stories in which the characters knew what they were seeing when they looked across a rural landscape, and thought it mattered. They were stories in which people didn’t get trapped in the coils of their own minds, or knew it was a bad thing if it did happen to them. I remember a fresh, open feeling associated with those books, and I see the same wide-open spaces in the print.
That’s probably a lot of baggage to load on to two little sparrows. But I think they hark back to a time in the country’s history when rural life influenced all aspects of our culture, and was central to it; and that is big baggage. Perhaps that time’s gone beyond reclaiming, or perhaps artists like Nick Wroblewski are part of a reclamation project. Anyway, these sparrows live over my bed now where I can look at them every morning.
