The Origin of Man through Prints

I have always been drawn to the biological aspect of art, in particular evolution. In my pieces I incorporated various ideas that reflect the idea of human evolution. I used three landmark phases of evolution to base my thesis on. Pan troglodytes, Paranthropus boisei, and Homo Sapiens sapiens are the three I choose to depict. In doing so, I created a short timeline in human evolution. I choose to portray these individually, and much larger than they would have been in real life. Large scale woodcuts at this scale have never been done before at Union College, so I had to utilize sheets of birch plywood (4’x 8’) in order to achieve this goal. Another passion of mine is dentistry. In collaboration with the large scale woodcuts I also drew and printed three lithographs corresponding with the dental cross-sections of each individual phase of evolution. The changes in dental morphology and jaw during the course of evolution show prominent evidence of natural selection, and heritable, advantageous traits. In order to make these large scale woodcut prints I had to discover a way to create enough pressure through the board to have the ink stick to the paper or cloth without using a press. To make this happen I bought a poly lawn roller to fill with water and roll over the prints. Printing is a process of trial and error. After many times printing and inking, there was still not enough pressure to transfer the image. My adviser and I decided to ink and print the old fashioned way which called for a printing process that is entirely done by hand, originally mastered by the ancient Japanese.