Buck starts here

Several woodcut prints in “John Buck: Iconography” loom 7 feet tall. Similarly, the exhibit itself towers in stature above the average Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture art show, for these reasons:

“ This is a rare traveling exhibit that did not arrive from somewhere else. The MAC curated it, originated it, and is hosting its premiere. After Spokane, it heads to Indiana, Iowa, California and beyond, through 2010.

“ A hardback book, “John Buck: Iconography,” has been printed by the MAC and the University of Washington Press.

“ It comes almost entirely from the collection of Jordan Schnitzer of Portland, one of the nation’s leading print collectors (his collection approaches 6,000) and one of the Northwest’s major art patrons (the University of Oregon’s art museum is named after him).

“ Finally, the exhibit itself is just plain enormous. The 50 pieces in this exhibit fill the MAC’s biggest exhibition space, the Davenport Gallery, which has never before been used for contemporary art.

John Buck himself looms large in the world of contemporary prints. Perhaps the best way to define Buck’s place in the art world is to say that Schnitzer also has world-class collections of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg. Yet Schnitzer considers Buck to be, absolutely, in the same class.

“I think John’s work is just as powerful as anything being done by anybody,” said Schnitzer from the offices of Harsch Investment Properties, the real estate development and management firm he heads. “He’s like the best symphony conductor, conducting an orchestra, through the magic of all his movements.”

Ben Mitchell, the MAC’s senior curator of art and the curator of this exhibit, certainly agrees.

“John is recognized as the pre-eminent woodcut printmaker of his generation,” said Mitchell. “Few people made woodcuts this large before John. The tonal qualities, the colors, everything – he’s a true master.”

Buck has built this worldwide reputation from, of all places, a horse farm near Bozeman. He’s a native Iowan who studied art at the University of California-Davis and then moved to Montana in 1976. Today, his work is in galleries in New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Seattle, to name just a few, as well as in many museums, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Yet this MAC exhibit, which officially opened Saturday and continues for six months, is the biggest exhibit of his career.

“There aren’t many other venues that have enough space for this many works,” said Buck, by phone from his home.

The accompanying scholarly book, with written contributions from John Yau, Bud Shark and Eleanor Heartney, is also a first for Buck.

“I’ve had catalogs before, but nothing like a book,” said Buck.

Since Buck turns out only about two or three prints a year, a 50-work exhibit is automatically a retrospective of Buck’s career. The earliest piece is from 1983.

“There aren’t very many of my prints that he (Schnitzer) doesn’t have,” said Buck.

Don’t be confused by the word “print.” These are not posters, nor are they mass-produced pictures of paintings.

In fact, said Mitchell, “the foundation of Buck’s art is wood-carving.”

He meticulously carves images into a wood panel, or a series of wood blocks. Then, when he’s satisfied with the intricate designs, he works with a master printmaker in Colorado who applies a specific color of pigment onto selected portions of the wood. Then a large sheet of paper is pressed against the wood, transferring the pigment to the paper. Then the process is repeated with different colors, adding layer on layer, color on color, until the artist and printmaker are satisfied with the finished work. Then they’ll make 10 or 15 prints off of the same wood carving. Each one turns out subtly different.

The process is complex – but not as complex as Buck’s subject matter. Most of his pieces look deceptively simple from afar. Most have a vivid central image – a bald eagle, perhaps, or a human figure.

If you choose to ponder this central image, you will be rewarded with its beauty and power. Yet if you choose to look closer, you’ll discover a multiplicity of surrounding images, many of which are deeply symbolic and some of which are outrageous.

For instance, in a piece called “The Times,” the central image is of newspapers providing fuel for a bonfire. Look closer, however, and you’ll see the air around the fire filled with butterflies. Look even more closely, and you’ll see that the butterflies are made of skulls. A Hannibal Lecter-like mask leers at you.

“He seduces you with the beauty of the work; you’re drawn to the pretty colors,” said Schnitzer. “But when you look more deeply, you’ll see a mix of disturbing images about the themes of our times. No matter how many times you look at one of his works, you keep seeing things you’ve never seen before. Therefore, his works are always alive to me. They always force me to smile, to frown and to puzzle, and that is the essence of what an artist should be.”

He touches on social, political and environmental themes – and doesn’t pull his punches.

“Sometimes, people get really worked up,” said Buck. “They think I’m the devil.”

Yet in Mitchell’s words, “the artists are sometimes the people who ask the essential and tough questions first.”

Printmakers, in particular, have a long history of social criticism, said Mitchell. Think Goya, with his “Disasters of War” and Hogarth with his scathing portrayals of English society.

Not all of the pieces in this exhibit are prints. The show also includes some of his wood-carvings and wooden sculptures. One piece, called “The Singer Tract,” is a gorgeous carved wood panel in which one half depicts woodpeckers, colored acrylic red, and the other half consists of carved symbols – masks, butterflies, hands – set off in separate boxes.

“Borderline” is a wooden carved female figure, colored deep cobalt blue, with symbols and designs balanced atop her off-set head. Buck has been quoted as saying that his sculpture is inspired by “contemporary issues as well as primitive and folk art of many cultures.”

This show will also have an educational component, where students can examine Buck’s tools, run their fingers over his actual carved wood blocks, and then enter a family activity room where kids (and adults) can make rubbings and learn exactly how these prints are made.

The bulk of the exhibit is underwritten by the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation. Schnitzer said the entire purpose of his unprecedented collection is to make these works “available to museums and expose as many people as possible to them.”