Texts

I have known Sandy Walker’s work for more than fifty years, yet can still remember the first time I encountered one of his woodcut prints. I use the term encounter deliberately because the experience was more than simply visual; it was physical. The bold, craggy edged “image” was so insistent and unapologetic that I felt it in my solar plexus.

Historically, the American landscape ascends to the Sublime. The nineteenth-century Hudson River painters recognized an inherent, potential transcendence in their panoramic vistas. The likes of Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, and Albert Bierstadt captured a magnificence, and a powerful, inexplicable life-force, verging on the artist’s and the viewer’s communal, spiritual consummation with
Nature.

"It's a kind of invitation for nature to play a role," says Sandy Walker, when I ask him about the wood he's chosen - rough grade industrial plywood - to carve for his woodblock prints. "I like the possibility for accident, the roughness, the scarring, the obvious...

by David Cohen
Sandy Walker: In Nature at Elizabeth Harris Gallery
Although Sandy Walker studied in New York in the 1960s – at Columbia and from its second year of operation at the New York Studio School –and went on to exhibit with some frequency at Grace Borgenicht Gallery through the next decade, his career has mostly centered on the Bay Area where he settled just as his New York career was taking off.

By Sandy Walker
In 1996 I was introduced to Sheila Marbain by someone who thought I might like to make some prints with her. Little did I know at that time that I was being introduced to one of the rare and secret treasures of the art world. Sheila is unknown mostly due to her natural reticence and lack of interest in self-promotion.