ROCK SPRINGS – The Art Gallery at Western Wyoming Community College will continue its 2014-15 season with the exhibit “Bittersweet,” a collection of woodcut reduction block prints by Colorado Springs artist and Colorado College Visiting Professor Jean Gumpper. “Bittersweet” runs from Monday, Oct. 6, until Thursday, Nov. 20.

In the reduction woodcut process, Gumpper explains, the image is printed from a flat surface of birch plywood rolled up in ink. The areas meant to be un-inked are cut away and the image is left in relief.  Paper is placed on the block, both are run through a press with pressure, and the ink is transferred to the paper.

The print develops in layers. The image is first drawn out on the wood. Then the areas meant to remain the color of the paper are cut away. The first color is printed and each piece of paper is carefully registered on the block before it is run through the press. After all of the pieces of paper in the edition (plus a couple more for mistakes) are printed with the first color, the block is cleaned off and everything meant to be the color just printed is cut away. The second color is then rolled out and printed onto the paper.

This process of cutting and printing is repeated until the print is completed, usually in small editions of 12 to 15. Many of these prints also include pochoir, a process where gouache paint is applied through a stencil. The pochoir process allows the artist to use specific localized color as well as gradated color and value.

In Gumpper’s work, the result of this delicate and painstaking process is a series of landscape representations that arise from Gumpper’s own time spent with nature.

“I respond to landscape as a metaphor for emotions and experiences,” Gumpper says in her Artist’s Statement. “Being alone in nature helps me to listen to my intuition and to have the patience necessary to really see. I seek to integrate the memories, sounds and feelings of being in the landscape into the making of the print, to integrate the process with form and content. It is a way for me to relive an experience and to share it with others.

“To me, these images become rich in meaning as they suggest resilience, renewal, beauty, and new life in a time of constant change,” she adds.

WWCC Gallery Director and Professor of Art Florence McEwin said the distinctiveness of Gumpper’s work transcends the subjects she interprets.

“Jean’s work, while reflecting nature, becomes a distinct entity within the confines of the wood block that transfers to the page in an elegant line that is pure Jean Gumpper,” McEwin said. “Her spirit and hand are connected to the emotions of place.”

Gumpper’s work is represented in galleries in Colorado, Minnesota, New York and Washington, as well as in Canada and Sweden, and her prints can be found in national and international collections. She has received an Individual Visual Artist Fellowship award from the Colorado Council on the Arts, and last spring she spent a month as artist-in-residence in the Grand Canyon.

Gumpper completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan and her Master of Arts and Master of Fine Arts at the University of Wisconsin. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at Boston University, the University of Colorado – Colorado Springs, Regis University, and the Harwood Museum in Taos, N.M., among many others.

For more information about “Bittersweet,” contact the WWCC Art Department at (307) 382-1723.

-From a press release