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PROVINCETOWN GUIDE
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| DIRECTORY |
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Provincetown :: Thursday, September 2nd 2010
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In Mazur Tones
By Mary J. Martin Schaefer of Provincetown Magazine
WOODBLOCK PRINTS AT THE ALBERT MEROLA GALLERY
July 2nd, 2009
As you open Michael Mazur’s current Web site, you are faced with a daunting quotation from Rabbi Hillel: “They who do not grow, grow smaller.” It’s true of trees, of course, but how does this idea touch Mazur’s work?
| “Art is a hard thing to define. It needs a certain authenticity. If you plan too much, it loses the moment that we all talk about. You have to unleash whatever instinct you have, and it really is an unleashing.” |
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“It’s sort of a little motto I live by,” says Mazur from his home in Cambridge, MA. “I don’t believe artists should live by what they know is successful. That to me is not taking advantage of the changes we grow through. It has to come naturally and has to come out of where you are.
“My working life is based really on bodies of work, not on continuing motion. It all makes sense if [the observers] kind of figure out what’s been going on. It doesn’t make sense if you only know my early paintings.
“There’s a risk in that, no doubt. You don’t necessarily develop international reputations because nobody knows where you’re going. You don’t know where you’re going.”
For Mazur, the term “body of work” means the individual building blocks that are periods of time in his life, and the particular work that develops out of each one. The lazy beauty of some of his recent woodcuts will show July 3 - 16 at the Albert Merola Gallery, 424 Commercial Street, Provincetown.
“Printmaking really is his medium,” says Merola, a man who talks easily and knowledgably about art. “He’s been dong it so long and has such command over his medium. He’s brilliant enough to go back and look at his work to combine images.”
These woodcuts are “about landscape and feeling.” Merola says. “His woodcuts are wonderful because of his lifelong experience with printmaking.”
In Gail’s Island II, Mazur uses the grain of the wood to imagine water, creating a random truth. He has been exploring grain work since the ‘90s . The Oriental flavor of the arrangement of shapes attains floating simplicity. The unbearably simple Rain on Water fascinates by the very rainy days it imitates. We have all seen such a second of water; Mazur realizes it with accuracy, yet that is not what intrigues, nor is it the wealth of technique that brought him to such clarity. It is its beauty combined with the absence of obvious effort.
“A lot of the more recent work relates to the beach. That comes out of the summer experience,” says Mazur, a Provincetown regular for many years now. “Rain on Water is influenced by Provincetown, by being there in the summer.
“My printmaking is probably more even over the years. It develops out of a system. Now, it sounds very cold blooded,” he says as a light apology. Every image he has in his mind calls for creating a sort of flowchart of procedure. The process through which the artist creates these prints is lengthy and scientific.
“I do a lot of proofing, a lot of playing around with it. Any print, except a very simple sketch, can take a month.
“The original idea begins to shift. As you’re moving along, three, four, five, sometimes seven, multiple blocks” come into play. “It’s touch and go. You don’t know how the cut will print. I even use the computer to make color separations, until you finally say, ‘Yes, that’s it, that’s what we want.’
“As you get closer, the changes get smaller and smaller.” There is, after all this time working in the same medium, a tone of wonder, of delight in his speech. “Then you look at one proof and you sign it bon a tiré, good to pull. The printer then prints from that.”
The possibilities of printmaking seem to please Mazur no end. “Pond Edge” is a body of prints. “For at least ten years, we’ve been moving the plates around. They’re a body of work within a body of work.”
Over time, Mazur has noticed that “one print has a conversation with the next print, just like a painting. While I’m working on one print, I may be thinking of a previous one, or it gives me an idea for the next. So, on it goes.”
The conversation at hand shifts to intuition. “Oh, I couldn’t work without intuition,” Mazur says, quite definitely. “Art is a hard thing to define. It needs a certain authenticity. If you plan too much, it loses the moment that we all talk about. You have to unleash whatever instinct you have, and it really is an unleashing.”
Until Mazur returns for another Provincetown summer, he spends time “drawing in my garden.”
Continuing his own conversation with his art is hard work. “I don’t blame people for coming to a halt. I’m lucky enough to be free enough to treat each day as a new day. Since I’ve done that, I’ve never had a bad day. I stopped resenting my work.”
The Michael Mazur – New Woodblock Prints exhibition runs July 3 - 16 at the Albert Merola Gallery, 424 Commercial St., Provincetown. An opening reception will be held on Friday, July 3rd, 8 - 10 p.m. at the gallery. Call 508.487.4424 or visit www.albertmerolagallery.com for more information.
Also visit ProvincetownMagazine.net for more articles and information.
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