Meet our current Working Artist: Jack Arthur Wood

Tiger Lily Press is continuing our

"Working Artist Program"

with Jack Arthur Wood.

Arthur has a strong background in relief printing

and plans on creating a series of 100 small linocuts

during his residency with us 

which will continue through May 2013.

His progress over the coming months

will be documented here, so stay tuned!

Abraxas

Hermaphrodite

Mahakala

Arthurs Statement:

"I began making art at a very young age, and have always found

 myself prone to the influence of creative forces and personalities. 

Throughout my life I have dabbled in a wild variety of creative endeavors

 including theater, rock n’ roll music, radio, classical music, and poetry.

 My poetry, and love of poetry, have often found their way into my work in the form of

 fleeting textual crypticisms, many of which aid narrative content.

 Visual art has always been my greatest love, however, and over the last several years

 I have developed a committed relationship to a low brow aesthetic of interpretation,

 a sieve through which I appropriate personal and religious myths. 

Through the development of my style, I have lassoed the validation and motivation necessary

 for the visceral procreation of my art. I move myself to work with self-degradation 

and an overbearing sense of guilt. Most of my work is dark

 and I feel it’s justified by the horrors of modern society.

 Although my content is derived largely from personal experience,

 I gather fodder and ferocity from a great many sources, mainly visual, but also literary. 

I feel that my work is mainly influenced by a fairly short list of creative persons.

 Francis Bacon is my foremost hero, and it is his philosophies of making 

and statements concerning his art that first made me brave in my own practice.

 Martin Ramirez, the self taught, catatonic schizophrenic, Californian artist, 

who spent most of his life institutionalized, is another one of my greatest heroes. 

I found a kindred spirit in the mania of his lines, and the intensity of

 his creative spirit and its manifestation.

 The Outlaw Printmakers are also very dear to me, and I have been

 lucky enough to come to know several of them. Aside from these foremost inspirations

 I also derive propulsion from the work of Friedensreich Hundertwasser

, Leonard Baskin, William S. Burroughs, Beatnik Poetry,

 Charles Bukowski, R. Crumb, Justin Greene, and a great many other comic book artists. 

Fairly recently I have become fantastically afflicted by the

 hereditary institution of compulsive collecting which runs in my dad’s family.

 I have started purchasing comic books, religiously, on a weekly basis, 

reading them over breakfast in bed each morning before I go to work at the auction house.

 My fascination with comic books has given way to the body of work

 I have begun working on for my residency at Tiger Lily Press. 

I will hopefully create a series of 100 small linocuts, approximately 12”x 12”,

 that will feature garish faces,

 effectively lo-fi personalities of slovenly lifestyles. I will also create a series of 18” x 24” linocuts 

which I currently envision as being mainly textual. 

The motivation for this body of work is re-immersion into more frequent drawing.

 I want to hone my skills and invest time into more sophisticated crosshatching.

 I also want to continue offending, disgusting,

 and scaring the white bread denizens of popular America.