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Gregory Pfarr — printmaking, painting

Winter Cascade Drawings/ Gregory Pfarr

For more than twenty years I have been making trips into the Oregon Cascades during the winter. Most of the time these trips are cross country ski trips in the remote back country areas. I take a sketchbook and a camera in order to photograph and draw in some of my favorite places. I have seen and experienced most of these places in many different kinds of weather and snow conditions. In the last four to five years some of these landscapes have changed considerably due to forest fires.    The pastel drawings in this exhibit are particular places which I find interesting in multiple ways. I am interested in broad fields of vision that can be interpreted in a variety of ways. I am also interested in the ways fire shapes and alters the landscape visually. Although I do also have an interest in the themes of life, death and rebirth in a burned forest, they are for me secondary to the visually compelling characteristics of the landscape. Since fire is part of the ecosystem of the Northwest forest these landscapes are not for me destroyed but are just part of a larger cycle. Just as the landscape develops over time so do my drawings. I see these particular drawings as being more about the process of recovery than destruction.   In my studio I use my photographs and drawings studies made on site to make larger and more ambitious finished drawings that are filtered through my sensibility as an artist. I use pastels because the media is particularly good at capturing that quality of different kinds of light on snow and because working fast with my hands pushing the pigment directly into the paper allows me to have a direct kinesthetic control over developing the drawing.

Formal Education: My interest in printmaking began in 1970 when I took my first printmaking class at Ohio State University. I received a BFA there in painting, drawing and printmaking in 1972. I then was accepted into graduate school there and received an MFA in printmaking in 1975. I studied woodblock and etching with Sidney Chafetz and lithography from Ken Farley who later worked as a master printer with Gemini GEL in Los Angeles with Ray Mahaffee. I also did independent studies with Hoyt Sherman who developed the art department's well known reputation as a leader in interdisciplinary research in vision for teaching students how to see relationships for making visually articulated and integrated artworks. My graduate school work was mostly a painterly abstraction based on patterns I saw in nature. I used field painting structures to organize my images.

Early influences: I was born in southwestern Ohio in a beautiful rural environment about 25 miles east of Cincinnati. Nature was an important influence from my earliest years. I was surrounded by woods, fields and near a beautiful creek on my grandfathers farm. I did drawings and paintings from my surroundings from a very early age. I was influenced by my father (a landscape and commercial artist) by trips into the Cincinnati Art Museum and by a lay organization of Catholic women who owned a large farm next door. It was access to their land and recognizing a spiritual attitude towards nature and farming that was an early influence and still continues to influence my artwork today.