LOCAL COLOR Printmaker David Morgan at the carving bench
Printmaker David Morgan at the carving bench.

Local Color Gallery is excited to welcome woodcut printmaker David Morgan as a guest artist for a show that began March 27.

Morgan will offer a woodcut printmaking workshop on May 4 during Print Day in May. An opening reception was held on March 29.

Morgan’s work has been shown and won awards in many venues around the United States and in Japan, Peru and the United Kingdom. He moved to Maine from New Mexico in 2013 and opened his print studio, the Merrymeeting Press, in Bath in 2015.

His career in art began with photography when it was still done with silver and light (but in the dark), and it went on to include woodcarving, furniture making and some fascinating detours, like working as an archaeologist in England. There, he discovered medieval sculpture, which inspired him to start carving and making prints from similar designs on scraps of wood in his cabinet shop. He still carves and prints medieval-inspired designs, though now he finds visual delight here in the contemporary world as well.

Making prints has always attracted him, ever since his early days as a photographer. 

“The alchemy of printmaking has always fascinated me,” he says. “It transmutes a visual idea through the crucibles of drawing, carving, inking and printing into a finished image that holds some surprises for its maker, and hopefully some delight for its viewer. The very indirectness of making prints — carving first [backwards], then patiently adding color and shape in many layers, not knowing what it will finally look like till the end of the process — invites the unexpected, in contradiction, you might think, to its technical demands. Playing with that contradiction is part of my creative process.”

Local Color Gallery is at 135 High St., Belfast. Learn more at localcolorgallerymaine.com.