Gary Groves

Gary Groves was born in 1938 in Decatur, Illinois, and has lived on Bainbridge Island for more than fifty years. His education moved between architecture, fine art, and Japan: the Architecture of Fine Arts program at the University of Oregon from 1960 to 1963, then travel and study in Japan in 1963–64, then the Fine Arts program at Oregon State University in 1969, then 1968 in Kamakura as an apprentice to printmaker Kozo Kotake, then Kyoto in 1975, and finally a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1975. He arrived at woodcut printmaking after working in sculpture, ceramics, photography, and painting, carrying each medium forward into the next.

His tool is the Dremel — not the traditional woodcut gouge — which allows the fine tonal gradation and near-photographic detail his images require. His subjects are the things most people pass without stopping: concrete bunkers long after their military purpose ended, rock formations along Highway 14 on the Washington side of the Columbia River gorge near Rocky Flat where Lewis and Clark once traveled, grasses, birds on a perch, the play of shadows through leaves. The prints are typically black and white, and the argument is made entirely through the quality of the carving — how much or how little of the block is removed, how the remaining ink sits against the white of the paper.

A single block can take a week or more to carve. In Central Park, The black ink sits with deliberate flatness across the composition, allowing the wood's grain and Dremel scarring to register as a secondary texture rather than atmospheric effect. Groves deploys fine linear hatching to suggest foliage density, then abruptly cuts through with broad white voids—negative space that functions as light but reads equally as absence, as what the tree refuses to reveal.

The silhouetted trunk and branches assert an almost heraldic frontality against this busy, nervous background, proposing that structure persists not through detail but through the artist's decision to withhold it. In Perch #4/20, The black ink sits densely matte against cream paper, its edges sharp where the Dremel carved clean channels that read as deliberate striation—parallel marks radiating downward create volumetric shadow while leaving paper exposed as a fine tracery of negative branches. The composition refuses spatial recession; instead it presses the silhouetted head forward as a near-monolithic mass, with white paper functioning not as atmosphere but as cut, structural evidence of the carving tool's path.