Sylvia Solochek Walters
(My) Falling Bear, Reduction Woodcut, 20 x 24" image,
2006
A Too Late Song (For Becky), Reduction Woodcut, 14 x 10 1/2" image, 2013
Vince's Horn, Reduction Woodcut, 23 ¾ x 12 ¼ image, 2017
For many years I used my prints to tell visual stories about family, memory, rites of passage, grief and loss, aging and healing. More recently I’ve focused on the environment, the slaughter of wildlife and other troubling calamities impacting the natural world. My images are pulled from nature, material culture, current events and the written word, family albums and art history – all loosely collaged in the field to suggest how their relationships build towards a larger narrative. Like most of the prints I’ve made in the last fifty or so years, these prints are reductive woodcuts made with stencils. They rely on a build-up of many colors, delicate surface detail and organic textures. I fell in love with the woodcut as a student many years ago and have yet to find anything to compare with it’s expressive potential for my own work.
Sylvia Solochek Walters received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She began teaching in 1963 eventually settling at the University of Missouri at St. Louis where she founded and chaired the art department, and, for ten years, served as director of the UMSL gallery. In 1984 she was invited to chair the art department at San Francisco State University. With the exception of two years during which time she served as Acting Dean of the SFSU College of Creative Arts, she remained as art department head for twenty years, then taught printmaking and other courses part-time. She became Professor Emerita in 2009 and currently serves on the Board of the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley. Walters’ reductive woodcuts employ an innovative system of stencils used to create a nuanced color palette, surface detail and rich organic textures. Her prints have been shown in numerous national/international exhibitions and are held in the collections of the Milwaukee, St Louis and Oakland Museums, the Chazen (formerly Elvejhem) Museum, the Library of Congress, the Judah Magnes and Milwaukee Museum of Jewish Art, the San Francisco Fine Arts Museums’ Achenbach Graphic Arts Collection, and the New York Public Library, among others.
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