Paul Landacre (1893-1963)
"Some Ingredients" (1954)
wood engraving, edition of 250
8" x 9"
"Sultry Day"
wood engraving, edition of 150
8" x 6" (SOLD)
"Children's Carnival"
wood engraving, edition of 265
10.50" x 14.50" (SOLD)
About the Artist
Paul Landacre was a virtuoso wood engraver with a singular technique and a modern, precisionist approach. During his lifetime, he was considered by art critics and artists, such as Rockwell Kent, as the finest American wood engraver of his time, and this view endures today. Enchanted by southern California landscape, flora and fauna, the artist is most renowned for depicting the rolling hills, deserts, beaches, and dramatic fires and storms around Los Angeles.
The artist’s early wood engravings were composed with sweeping, parallel lines to describe the sensuous curves of a hillside or a nude figure. By the early to mid- 1930s, he had refined his technique to a highly personal method of precise, meticulous cutting and fine crosshatching. Progressing even further beyond traditional woodcutting methods and towards greater abstraction, he used a multitude of different strokes of the burin to create sinuous lines and subtle textures and patterns. The striking clarity and beauty of his compositions, which contrast brilliant whites with velvety deep blacks, endowed his prints with a modernity that was unusual in other American or European wood engravings of the period.
Landacre’s prints are in the collections of most major museums, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, New York Museum of Modern Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Achenbach Foundation of Graphic Arts.
