In love with a new print artist, Giertje Postma: week 9, day 7 (Friday)

I am continually awed by the seemingly infinite variety of human artistic expression, even when confined to one medium. I keep discovering new artists I like, whose work may have something in common with one or more artists I already know and love, but whose style is distinctive.

Enter Giertje Postma (1961-). She came to the Academie Minerva in Groningen in 1984 to learn to paint. She quickly learned that the clean lines of drawing suited her better than painting, but drawing wasn’t quite right. She found her way to printmaking, and left Groningen in 1989 a skilled printmaker.

Her chosen technique is color woodcut reduction, a complex method involving printing one color layer on as many pieces of paper as desired for final product, then carving away the block to leave the areas desired in the next color and printing the 2nd color on those same papers (very carefully aligned, of course), and so on. Postma crushes it with this technique, as you’ll see shortly. This is such a complicated process that I doubt my very brief explanation does more than give you a vague idea, so here are a few better descriptions with pictures, starting with the shortest and getting longer as you go down the list.

How does color reduction relief printing work?

• https://dongorvettgallery.com/what-is-a-reduction-woodcut-
• http://marketweightpress.com/process-of-a-reduction-woodblock-print-and-pics-from-frogmans/
• https://bit.ly/30fQmTa
• https://meshartgallery.com/blogs/news/the-rise-of-color-reduction-prints

Postma’s dazzling prints feel like a combination of the detailed, texture, almost photorealistic B&W prints of Martin Lewis or Stow Wengenroth , with the vivid colors of Andy Lovell. Again, you hear my cry of pain at having to choose one print among many amazing ones. In the end, as with many of these choices, I picked one that was not only beautiful, which felt appropriate to the circumstance (day, season, weather, etc).

2013-I (color woodcut reduction, 2013)