User:Cullen328/Sandbox/Killion

Tom Killion is a California woodblock print artist whose work has concentrated on landscapes of the California Coast Ranges and Sierra Nevada. His work has "a refined simplicity and sharpness of line reminiscent of the classic Japanese prints".

Background
Killion grew up in Mill Valley, California.

Killion attended the University of California Santa Cruz and earned a doctorate in African history at Stanford University, specializing in Ethiopia. From 1987 to 1988, he was in an Eritrean refugee camp during the Eritrean War of Independence. He received a Fulbright scholarship to teach at Asmara University in Eritrea. He also taught history at Bowdoin College in Maine. But most of his adulthood, he said, was spent in Santa Cruz. He is married to Brazilian-born Caroline Frota, whom he met in Santa Cruz, and is the father of son Kai, 16, and daughter Camila, 7. "I have become more reclusive," he said, holing up in a hillside studio in Inverness Park above Tomales Bay, working on woodcuts of the natural world around him. "I've been doing prints of Mount Tam for 40 years." His art sprang from youthful encounters with the work of Japanese woodblock artist Katsushika Hokusai, best known for his series, "Thirty Six Views of Mount Fuji.""

" Killion turns a cylinder that draws a sheet of handmade Japanese paper through his German proofing press."

"adaptation of traditional techniques developed by early-l9th-century Japanese print artists. The use of Japanese hand tools, for example, gives his work ... that inspired French Impressionist Claude Monet."

"Tom has a wonderful ability to look both to the East and to the West," explains Kathleen Moodie of the Museum of Art and History in Santa Cruz, California. "What impresses me most, however, is how intimately he knows the terrain he represents. Instead of showing a mountain off in the distance, he gets up close, conveying the sense of what it's really like to be there."

"The woodcuts Killion makes are the tools he uses to produce color prints of images of the High Sierra, the California coast, Big Sur and the Bay Area's Mount Tamalpais, among other settings. A few years ago, he published and hand-printed "The High Sierra of California," a collection of his woodcut prints paired with selections from the Sierra diaries of Pulitzer Prize-winning California poet Gary Snyder."

"I got started thinking of Mount Tam and Fuji as a child," Killion said. In particular, he was fascinated by "100 Views of Mt. Fuji" by the Japanese artist Hokusai. "I began looking at the mountain as Hokusai did with Fuji," Killion said. In his early teens, he began to compile the work, which he collected in 1975 into his first hand-printed book, "28 Views of Mount Tamalpais."

"Killion's distinctive, Japanese-style woodblock prints."

"Killion, 55, who grew up in Mill Valley and earned a doctorate in African history from Stanford."

"A fine guide and a careful historian"

"a highly elegant mating of Snyder's poems and trail-notes, excerpts from the writings of naturalist John Muir and the superb and often stunning woodcuts of printer and printmaker Killion. The hand-carved wood and linoleum block prints - - sometimes stately and solemn, sometimes mysterious and mystical, sometimes rollicking and even slightly ribald -- are the visual equivalent of Snyder's poetry and the real glory of the book."

"There is the breathtaking volume "Walls" by Tom Killion, who was a backpacking young artist-around-Marin-County a decade or so ago; from that period came his definitive "Fortress Marin," marked by fine woodblock illustration. Now he has written about his travels throughout the world, illustrating it with more than 30 color woodblock plates and even more two-color ones, in an edition limited to 100. The woodblocks are in six colors, the notes at the book's last page mention simply that each volume required 199 pulls of Killion's hand press. Little wonder that in Los Angeles Dawson's Rare Books has only a single copy of this glorious book, nor that it's $950."

"Tom Killion carves the blocks for his Japanese-style woodcut prints using Japanese handtools which he sharpens on Japanese water stones. For the last decade or more he has been primarily using shina plywood blocks, made in Japan specifically for moku hanga (woodcut) printmaking from Japanese linden wood; but Killion has experimented with cherry, pear, fir and various end-grain blocks including boxwood (intended for European-style wood engraving). Killion uses an array of 20 tools, handling them in a "Western" manner, and spends up to 40 working hours to create a large and elaborate key block. Killion will demonstrate his woodblock carving techniques in the artist studio today only.Tom was born and raised in Mill Valley, California, on the slopes of Mount Tamalpais. The rugged scenery of Marin County and Northern California inspired him from an early age to create landscape prints using linoleum and wood, strongly influenced by the traditional Japanese ukiyo-e style of Hokusai and Hiroshige. He studied history at U.C. Santa Cruz, where he was introduced to fine book printing by William Everson and Jack Stauffacher, and has since printed multiple books, including two award-winning books in collaboration with Pulitzer prize-winning poet Gary Snyder, The High Sierra of California and Tamalpais Walking. In October 2009 Killion and his studio in Point Reyes, California, were featured on the PBS program Craft in America: Process. Tom sells his work in galleries and on his website, TomKillion.com."

"The art of multi-color block printing is so demanding that to an outsider it seems almost cruel in the servitude it requires. To execute a print such as “Bolinas Ridge to Point Montara” Tom Killion had to carve fifteen separate wood blocks and commit himself to 300 hours of meticulous labor. One might expect the result to look overworked, but behold the miracle: a scene of startling freshness and radiance. Flowers sparkle in the foreground, trees bend to the wind, waves crash around sea stacks, clouds scuttle past distant mountains, and three birds hover in a world of clarity and delight, a world vibrant and distinct, a world that evokes wonder and gladdens the heart, a world alive, alive, alive."