Willard Clark: Printer & Printmaker

by David Farmer

"Willard Printer & Printmaker is the story of the life and achievements of an accomplished twentieth-century American printmaker whose career in commercial printing and color woodcut illustration came to define the art colony of Santa Fe beginning in the late 1920s." "The Bohemian life was in full swing when Willard Clark (1910-1992), an easterner who had spent some of his growing up years in Argentina, visited Santa Fe en route to California and decided to stay. The year was 1928, and the man, not yet twenty, embraced the town that had all the elements of a thriving art colony. Isolated and self-sufficient, free of the conventions and standardization of American life elsewhere, it was the perfect place for a young artist in the company of writers, painters, and abundant characters to embark on a creative career." "Trained in fine arts, Clark veered toward the commercial, becoming the city's full time job printer, handling the commercial work for the local hotels, restaurants, and the social and business scene. His menus, letterheads, and advertisements, illustrated with the finely crafted artistic sensibility of his woodcut prints, characterized the look of Santa Fe and recorded some of its richest cultural moments. His imagery - burros laden with wood, Spanish women clad in shawls, adobe churches and village scenes - transcended the commercial realm and allowed this typographer and printer of great skill to carve his place in American art as well." In 1942, Clark closed his studio, put down his woodcarving tools, and took a job at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which supported his family for the next thirty years. Then, in 1981, he was encouraged again to return to thestudio. His charming wood-engraves images now spoke of old Santa Fe and a time when artists and craftsmen built their own adobe houses, hosted one another with bootleg, reveled in the ex-pat lifestyle, and made art every day. From 1981 until 1992, Willard Clark again carves and printed his technically accomplished illustrations, eventually in service to his memoir in woodcut prints, Recuerdos de Santa Fe.

Paperback

First published March 15, 2008