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Anniversary of my very first art exhibition, 35 years ago today – February 11th 1977, Salle Arago, Perpignan France.
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1977 exhibition woodcuts poster
At the time, my very knowledge limitation and experience were giving only real consideration to what I thought to be ‘painting’ on canvas! For example I regarded drawing [ and water color] as the bases for learning the lines that will then help me to start to work with my oil paints.
Still, even so ‘painting’ remained my exclusive and only goal, I felt [ and still do] it was important to show drawings as well. I regarded them as an ‘honest’ display of my working process of what I believed to be The ‘image creation’. In fact, by doing so, I only demonstrate that my paintings were not as well crafted as my drawings were and this was of course noticeable to a critical eye…the reason was obvious, I had worked and challenged myself way more using pen and ink than the brush and the oil.
Because one does not necessary achieve results on trying to master some given technic, one must hope for luck for an other one popping up, and for me it was woodcut, it was a pure accident trigger by the need and the urgency of the moment that became not just an other technic but a genuine way on my trying to communicate with others.
In 1977, how do you ‘advertise’ to the public you are presenting an exhibition in a small provincial city of France? Forget about the web! May be a poster? What people call today image and type. Inside an old garage I started experimenting by cutting a piece of wood, than I manage to find a way to print it using a small book binding press. I did not have the opportunity to learn the process from someone , I missed it terribly but maybe it was not so bad as it forced me to ‘reinvent’ it in a way it could serve my needs…if anything else it was a begining.
The following images as a proof of my very early experiments.
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1976 woodcut – fishing boats in Coilloure
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1976 woodcut – sea scribe
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1976 woodcut – market in Coillioure
1976 woodcut – L’Ermitage de Font-Romeu
1976 vinyl print
– drawings, woodcuts, linoleum cuts, photographs and texts copyright Raymond Verdaguer, 2012.
