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michael schlitz

new woodblocks

Anne Kirker
Eyeline 73
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Michael Schlitz has just sent me a jpg of his studio in Canberra where he was artist-in-residence at the Australian National University Art School. Normally he lives and works out of a remote part of Tasmania and it is that context, with its unspoilt natural environment, which at the moment helps drive his work. Not surprising then to see the familiar large black and white woodcuts of figures metamorphosing into trees and boat-like vessels informally pinned up on the studio wall along with fragments of working proofs, collages, and drawings. Some he brought across from Tasmania with him, others are new. Irrespective of the different locations, all share the characteristic dark (yet playful) tenor of Schlitz’s relief prints of the past few years. It is as though his imagery has emerged from a sunken well to express our interdependent links with nature but also to convey the mystery of inner states of feeling and emotion. This artist’s imagination gives full reign to the power of symbolism and myth (almost pantheistic) as it does to convey a genuine concern with the degradation of wilderness by clear felling and logging.

The titles of the twenty relief prints at Grahame Galleries bear this out. Printed in black ink on Japanese Kozo paper, they are mostly dated 2009–2010 and confined to just one or a few words that have poetic resonance: water table/well, diviner, float, builder, library, journey, rhizome, sisyphus end, for example. They remind me that Schlitz has also made artist’s books (such as the 2005 the nature of things) where screen-printed text is counterpoised with small engravings which reflect the spare enigmatic words. Like

Michael Schlitz, water table/well, 2009. Woodblock on Kozo paper, 62.5 x 87.5cm. Courtesy grahame galleries + editions. Photograph Carl Warner. 

Michael Schlitz, water table/well, 2009. Woodblock on Kozo paper, 62.5 x 87.5cm. Courtesy grahame galleries + editions. Photograph Carl Warner. 

Michael Schlitz, desert flower, 2009. Woodblock on Kozo paper, 62.5 x 87.5cm. Courtesy grahame galleries + editions. Photograph Carl Warner. 

Michael Schlitz, desert flower, 2009. Woodblock on Kozo paper, 62.5 x 87.5cm. Courtesy grahame galleries + editions. Photograph Carl Warner.