Kate Hanlon Biography
Kate Hanlon (b. 1957) is an award-winning printmaker, who spent the past thirty years creating white-line woodcuts. She also expresses her creativity through drawing, painting, and playing an Irish fiddle. Hanlon’s subjects for her prints are a synthesis of observation and invention that reflect scenes from her life on Boston’s North Shore and her travels throughout New England and beyond. Now residing in Deer Isle, Maine, Hanlon plans to carry the tradition of white line woodcut into Maine and the twenty-first century.
This uniquely American medium began in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in 1915, by a group of artists who experimented with a white-line woodcut technique based on Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints. The eastern artists used several blocks of wood to produce a finished print, while the artists in Provincetown developed a technique that allowed for multicolored images to be made from a single block of wood. They became known as the Provincetown Printers, and their prints became known as the Provincetown Print or white-line woodcut.
White-line prints are time consuming to produce since only one print can be produced at a time. Shapes are created the woodblock by etching a line that remains white while during printing. Then each shape has to be separately brushed with paint and printed before the next color can be applied. Therefore each print is unique even though the same block is used. It can take months to finish an edition of multicolored prints.
“I first became acquainted with the white-line woodcut medium as a university printmaking student, while waitressing in Provincetown during the summers. I was intrigued by their luminous colors, sophisticated yet simplified designs, and low tech approach. There was no one teaching the method at that time, so I taught myself to print by trial and error.”
“There’s something about working with wood that I love; its warmth to the touch, color and fragrance. The woodblock had a full life of its own as a tree before lending itself to my own creative impulses, and the history of its life is captured in the grain patterns that become a part of my print. It’s a sort of collaboration; in my response to the woodgrain, I enjoy allowing the tree to live again through my prints.”
Hanlon earned a BFA with a concentration in printmaking from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1982. From 1982–2005, she was Master Printer of Fine Art Limited Editions at R.E. Townsend Studio, Boston, Massachusetts. There she executed editions for nationally renowned artists such as Robert Motherwell, Jim Dine, Alex Katz, Michael Mazur, Richard Diebenkorn, Robert Mapplethorpe, among others. Hanlon has taught drawing and printmaking at the Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH, Concord Center for the Arts, Concord, MA, Cambridge Art Association, Cambridge, MA. She plans to continue to teach printmaking at her stuio on Deer Isle.
Hanlon is a member of the Boston Printmakers and the Society of American Graphic Artists. Her award-winning white-line woodcuts may be found in many private collections, as well as in the collections of the Boston Athenaeum, Boston Public Library, Library of Congress, Danang, Vietnam Art Museum, and Indianapolis Museum of Art.