Lines and Faces, Broadsides exhibit by Robert Woods

The Broadsides Exhibit is part of the performance piece Divining Triptychs: Printmaking, Dance, and Poetry Across Millennia, which takes place Friday, March 10 at 7 pm and Saturday, March 11 at 4 pm. Gualala Arts Local Eyes Presents: Dancer and choreographer Lucinda Weaver, poet Alan Bern, and artist Robert Woods.

The Lines and Faces Broadsides Exhibit will remain on display through April 1 at Gualala Arts Center.

Lines & Faces is a publishing company that has produced fine art broadsides for 40 years in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Lines & Faces has featured primarily the work of printmaker and painter Robert Woods and poet and short story writer Alan Bern who grew up together in Berkeley in the 1960s.  Both Woods and Bern became commercial printers, but also continued to produce works that combined Woods’s prints and Bern’s writing as well as the writing of other poets, such as Robert Hass and John Anson.

Robert Woods trained as both a fine artist and craftsman at U.C. Santa Barbara and with a number of practicing artists: he is a sculptor, painter, and printmaker and is currently retired. Woods worked for over thirty years at Madison Street Press in Oakland, including managing the shop. He has used a variety of printmaking techniques including wood engraving, letterpress and etching. In addition to drawing and painting he also uses Adobe Illustrator to prepare blocks photomechanically, and he also engraves wood blocks by hand. Some of his Lines & Faces work has been imaged directly on archival material from those Adobe Illustrator files.