Woodcuts & Engravings

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A true revivalist in an era in which most commercial illustrations were migrating to photography and other media, Ferro’s superpower continued to be an ancient and labor-intensive medium that has been around since the late 800s AD, the woodblock print, and its material “brother,” the wood engraving (William Caxton Jr., "The Woodcuts of Walter Ferro," American Artist, 1962). Painstaking attention to detail in carving the block, a sturdy meticulousness in monochrome, and eventually an intricate use of color woodcuts that became his primary form, were hallmarks of his craft. Conceptually culling from both realism and abstraction, few American artists of the 20th Century so mastered this labor-intensive creative process with such a range of techniques and styles.