Karen Kunc

Karen Kunc (American, b. 1952) relishes her doodles. Modest black-and-white sketches on small 5" x 7" cards ignite her creative process. Devoid of color, her doodles germinate the concept, which she nurtures carefully. The emergence of a concept prompts her to peruse and select from her inventory of exquisite handmade Japanese paper. A full-scale black-and-white drawing, morphing from the sketch, ensues as Kunc continues to avoid the prejudices of color to ensure an interim bias toward composition, tonal ranges, details, and movement. This follows with a line tracing of her drawing, or “key drawing,” which she transfers to a slightly oversized block, anticipating the “bleed” that will overtake the margins. As the concept comes to fruition Kunc starts carving the block that becomes the work of art. Methodically but intuitively, she allows the doodle to dissolve as the imagery emerges. She reflects: “It is impossible for me to know each prospective cut or carved mark, and I enjoy the evolution of the work, in which I can respond to the development in the process.”

Kunc’s masterful technique is not dictatorial. She embraces the transformation inherent in the reduction woodblock printing process, which she aptly describes as “printing-carving-printing-carving-printing, etc.” As the nascent artwork forms, the blocks, like the germinal doodle, dematerialize. Finally comes the explosion of color, tepid at first as Kunc initially applies the ink in transparent washes, then increasingly forceful, cajoling her to improvise in selected areas as the reduction of the block continues. The faint whisper of the 5" x 7" black-and-white doodle further dissipates throughout this process until the final print clearly reveals itself to its maker. She writes: “I have cultivated my aesthetic and process this way so that it mirrors the content.”

Kunc’s statement resounds in Fire Crown, her color-reduction woodblock print for the Print Club of Cleveland. The dialectic intrinsic to her technique perpetuates in the subject—a tree—a motif that she revisits frequently. Creation/elimination, inherent in the marks on the block, propels the growth of the tree in Fire Crown. Kunc explains: “I have personified this form as if the branches are offering, entreating, entwining, ensnaring. It becomes a metaphor for growth/decay, evolving life, nature vs. man-made, organic vs. geometric.”

Karen Kunc’s art is rooted in her native Nebraska, the landscape of the Great Plains, which cyclically exerts durability and succumbs to vulnerability. She currently serves as professor emeritus at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where she earned her BFA in 1975 before going on to complete her MFA at the Ohio State University in 1977. Widely exhibited and internationally heralded, well beyond the heartland, her works reside in prestigious public and private collections such as the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (Egypt), the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Fogg Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

There is a startling volatility in Fire Crown, which Kunc describes as “burst from sparks,” gestating from a doodle into a “beautiful danger.” Kunc carefully calibrated the print’s development while reveling in her lack of complete control. In destroying the blocks, she activates the image, so it becomes a “being on the edge of conflagration or energy transmission.” As an artist, Karen Kunc is ever probing, charged with that energy: “All my works have in common the quest into how we make things, the questions of creativity, how things are formed from chaos to order, from chance to meaningfulness, how nature is shaped by forces, by human impact, with purpose and random chance.”

Darlene G. Michitsch