William Hays: Print Master of Wintry Scenes

 

 

 

My search was on to find an artist whose works, or some portion, portrayed winter and the holidays in a classic manner. I had almost given up when I discovered William Hays (1956-)

 

 

Hays was already mastering oil and water color painting by the age of 15. About 2007, he began teaching himself linocut and woodcut printing. He enjoyed printing so much that he moved away from painting to exclusively creating in print.

In spite of the technical challenges and limitations of printing, he comments that he has,"made it part of my vocabulary over time." Hays appreciates the meditative time that creating print blocks provides. (I thought the same when I was carving wood blocks for a print class.)

 

His inspiration for his works is found in the outdoors. For this blog, I've chosen some of his prints of winter - something he knows very well having lived in Alaska and now making his home in Vermont. However, his prints are so beautiful that I know there'll be a future blog about the other seasons he's captured. 

Hays is definitely a print master, who is deservedly recognized nationwide. 

Sergio Odeith: Street Art with a High WOW Factor

 Street art is provocative (think Banksy) or delightful (think David Zinn and his whimsical menagerie.) It's also so realistic and large to extract a "wow" factor from viewers if the artist is Sergio Odeith (1976-) Like Zinn, Odeith creates 3-dimensional art when viewed from a certain angle.

 

 

Odeith grew up in Portugal and is entirely a self-taught artist. His fascination with shading and perspective started at an early age. He also started using spray paints as a youngster. Like most kids, his first outdoor works were illegal works on street walls and railway lines. As he improved his skills, he began to paint large murals, especially in poorer Portugal neighborhoods

Continuing to be fascinated by perspective, Odeith evolved a technique he named, "sombre 3D." It involves using angles, lines and shadows to create a very realistic 3-D effect. Additionally, the realistic animals, bugs and spiders are scarily large.

 His large murals led to contracting with companies such as Samsung and Coca-Cola, among others, including soccer teams and municipalities all over Europe and the United States.

 

 

All this from a gifted artist, who dropped out of school at 15 to pursue his creativity in his own way. As Odeith said in an interview, "Keep working hard, chase your dreams and never give up."

  (Below is an example of how he turns a wall into another object.)