H. Peik Larson "Walking Prints"

In more ways than one, Larsen’s art is defined by a fascination with process. Thematically, he is attracted to entropy, showcased in earlier works such as Bristol, a series of twelve prints tracking the changes in a rural landscape over the course of almost thirty years, and Shades of Home, an artist’s book that reflects upon the ins and outs of quotidian domestic life. For Larsen, printmaking itself engenders this cumulative approach, with old work suggesting new artistic directions, and vice-versa. Speaking on this aspect of his craft, he muses, “That's one of the things I love about printmaking, you preserve the archaeological probing for future discovery. "Walking Prints" takes as its inspiration his wife’s recovery after a serious bicycle accident, a two-month-long period in which she had to relearn basic motor skills as well as her ability to walk. Following her as she took her first hesitant steps kindled in the artist a fascination with walking, which he tracks sequentially throughout the works in the show. Larsen’s sensitivity to the process of printmaking and cumulative change is particularly well-suited to this aim, and one senses in his prints an analog of sorts to his wife’s rediscovery of the act of walking, itself a process.InWalking/Seal, an assemblage of a print and the tools used to make it, the artist gives a concrete statement of this reciprocal relationship, juxtaposing the mechanics of technique with the movement of walking, shown in the print. To make this work the artist carved directly into a printmaking brayer, a tool historically used to break up and spread ink on a plate.Instead, Larsen is cutting out the middle man and bypassing the printing plate in favor of a more direct application of content to material and ink to paper. The other prints in the exhibition comprise a diverse variety of printmaking
forms, ranging from chine colle, intaglio, and photogravure, among others, demonstrating Larsen’s devotion to the material exploration of printmaking.H. Peik Larsen studied art at Middlebury College and the San Francisco Art Institute, and received an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts College graduate program. He has worked as a professional printer at Fox Graphics in Boston and Via Santa Reparata in Italy. He shows his paintings, prints, and books at Victoria Munroe Fine Art in Boston, DNA in Provincetown, and Freight+Volume in New York City, and is in many collections in this country and in Europe. For many years he taught printmaking at Harvard and has been a visiting artist and critic at New England art schools.