Wild River

Tagged as a landscape and dating from late in Dennis's working life, Wild River turns from the industrial waterfront to undammed water. Pacific Northwest rivers — the Skagit, the Hoh, the Sol Duc, the Elwha — provided regional printmakers with subjects that combine steep banks, conifer cover, and broken water, all of which carve directly in relief. Dennis's woodcut idiom favors flat tonal masses for foliage and current, with linear marks reserved for branches, foam, and rock edges. The subject places the print in dialogue with the Japanese landscape tradition — Hokusai's and Hiroshige's river and waterfall images — as much as with the American landscape woodcut practiced by the early-20th-century Provincetown printers. By 1999 Dennis had been working for some thirty years, and Wild River participates in his late return to less-mediated natural subjects after a decade weighted toward urban and industrial themes.