Lockwood Dennis

Lockwood Dennis (1937–2012) was an American painter and woodcut printmaker whose mature practice was rooted in the small towns and industrial waterfronts of the Pacific Northwest. Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1937, Dennis took an unusually long route into a printmaking career: he earned a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy at Whitman College in 1960 and a Master of Arts at the University of Washington in 1963 before turning to studio art. To support himself in these years he worked for the U.S. Forest Service in eastern Oregon and the Cascades.

In 1967 he enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he was awarded a Junior Fellowship the following year. In 1969 he taught at the Charles River Art Center in Massachusetts, and from 1970 to 1974 he taught at the Yakima Valley College Evening School in eastern Washington. In 1975 he settled in Port Townsend, the Olympic Peninsula port town that became his home for the rest of his life and that supplied many of the maritime, small-industrial, and main-street motifs recurring across his prints. Travels through the western United States — and farther afield to places including Japan and Africa — fed a lasting interest in the natural world and the landscapes and townscapes he would depict.

Across a forty-five-year career Dennis produced more than four hundred woodcuts. His images pare a Northwest street, a wrecking yard, or a passing trolley down to bold, flat planes and a compact repertoire of carved marks, with a graphic economy characteristic of the relief-print medium. Automobiles, trucks, buses, ferries, and trains — often the vintage vehicles he remembered from childhood — become the principal characters of his compositions, which he rendered in both black-and-white and color and frequently emptied of people so that architecture and machinery take center stage. His recurring subjects are quintessentially Northwest American: 1940s sedans and trolley buses, water tanks and tower buildings, wrecking yards, working ports, hillside houses, and small-town intersections. Editions were typically modest, with working proofs and artist's proofs often retained.

Davidson Galleries in Seattle — now operating as Gallery No.85, at 85 Yesler Way — has been the principal handler of his work during his lifetime and since his death, and holds the largest single repository of his graphic output. His prints are also represented in public collections including the Library of Congress, the Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner, and the Jefferson Museum of Art and History in Port Townsend. Within the Pacific Northwest woodcut tradition, Dennis is remembered for a durable body of bold, nostalgic black-and-white and color prints that documented the vernacular architecture, transport, and working waterfronts of the region in the second half of the twentieth century.