Lisa Brawn is an artist from Calgary, Alberta who has been experimenting with figurative woodcuts for over twenty years since being introduced to the medium by printmakers at Alberta College of Art and Design.
A couple of years ago, Lisa Brawn landed an opportunity in form of five truckloads of salvaged hundred year old Douglas fir beams from Alberta Block in Calgary with which she has been creating magic. The wood has knots, nails, holes, gouges "which is interesting in its history and also is oddly shaped", as she puts it. She matched the quirky nature of the material with the quirky subject matter in her work and has produced portraits of 20s pop culture people, TV westerners from 60s and 70s, international icons, celebrities, wildlife, owls and birds.
The hand-carved, one-of-a-kind woodcut blocks are a piece of art in itself with the raised areas of wood painted in black and the recessed areas painted in vibrant colors. What makes her work standout is the patterns and lines used in the background in her work and sometimes on the faces of her subjects.
You can find prints created by the woodcut blocks at Saatchi Art and for the original blocks you can visit her online store. To see more of her work, go to her Flickr profile where her work is placed under several categories.
