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, but whose graphic vocabulary drew openly on a hybrid of European, American, and Japanese sources. Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, Dennis took an unusually long route into a printmaking career: he completed a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy at Whitman College in 1960, then continued with a Master of Arts in philosophy at the University of Washington in 1963, and only afterwards began the studio training that would lead him into a forty-five year working life as an artist.

In 1968 he won a junior fellowship from the School of the Fine Arts in Boston, which gave him a year of studio practice in Massachusetts, and in 1969 he joined the Charles River Art Center as a teacher. The following year he moved across the country to the Pacific Northwest and began teaching at Yakima Valley College in Washington State. In 1975 he settled in Port Townsend, the Olympic-Peninsula port town that became his home for the remaining thirty-seven years of his life and that supplied many of the maritime, small-industrial, and main-street motifs that recur across his print catalogue.

Writing about his own practice, Dennis identified four principal sources for his graphic style: German Expressionism, Japanese woodblock printmaking, mid-twentieth-century American comics, and the industrial design of the WPA murals and posters of the 1930s. The Japanese strand of that influence is visible in the way his prints reduce a small American street, a wrecking yard, or a passing trolley to flat planes of black ink and a small repertoire of carved marks — a vocabulary closer to the bold simplifications of sosaku-hanga creators such as Munakata Shiko or Onchi Koshiro than to the more illusionistic Western relief tradition. Most of his prints are pulled in black-and-white, occasionally augmented by reduction-block colour. He produced over four hundred woodcuts in the course of his career.

The subjects across the catalogue at Gallery No.85 — the Seattle gallery that has handled his work since the Davidson Galleries era — are quintessentially Northwest American: 1940s sedans and trolley buses, two-truck convoys waiting at level crossings, water tanks and tower buildings rising over Magnolia, wrecking yards, working ports, hillside houses, lone whistles, and small-town intersections. The 'Two Trucks' image exists in both a 1986 black-and-white version and a 1995 colour reduction; the 'Sunday' image appears in a 1986 working-proof state. Editions are typically modest, often in the range of twenty-five to fifty impressions, with working proofs and artist's proofs frequently retained.

Dennis was a full-time studio artist for the second half of his career; he taught at Charles River Art Center and Yakima Valley College only briefly, and his subsequent income came from his print sales and from periodic large-scale public commissions. Davidson Galleries — now operating as Gallery No.85 in Seattle — has been the principal handler of his archive both during his lifetime and after his death, and the gallery's website now lists more than two hundred and twenty Dennis prints, the largest single repository of his graphic work.