Past Exhibition

Lockwood Dennis: Woodcuts

October 24 – November 20, 2020

Study Gallery and Print Study Center

Lockwood Dennis (American, 1937-2012) was a highly regarded Port Townsend, Washington printmaker who studied at Whitman College, the University of Washington, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Organized by director John Olbrantz and drawn from public and private collections in Oregon and Washington, the exhibition features 36 woodcut prints and related ephemera that depict iconic scenes of Seattle, Portland, and the artist’s travels throughout the western United States. 

Throughout his forty-five-year career as an artist, Lockwood Dennis (American, 1937–2012), known as “Woody,” depicted subjects that reflected his travels to Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, eastern Oregon and Washington, and as far away as Colorado, Texas, and Japan. His bold, sturdy, colorful, and nostalgic compositions are populated with industrial buildings standing guard, houses watching streets, factories trying to outdo each other, and only occasionally people. Automobiles, trucks, buses, ferries, and trains become the principal characters and protagonists in Dennis’s evolving dramas. 

The artist wrote in 2006, “What I would like to come across [in my work] is the magic of pictorial space that is somehow animated by its components, a drama, a sense of intrigue. That’s the fun part for me, too.”

Born in Portland, Oregon, and educated at Whitman College, the University of Washington, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Dennis served in the Peace Corps in Africa in the late 1960s and taught art at Yakima Valley College in eastern Washington in the early 1970s before he moved to Port Townsend, Washington, on the Olympic Peninsula in 1975. His woodcut prints can be found in numerous public and private collections throughout the region, including the Hallie Ford Museum of Art.