A photogravure starts as a copper plate and finishes as ink pressed down into paper, which is why the print has a surface that a photograph does not have. You can see the difference across a room and you can feel it with a finger. Willis F. Lee has spent a working life inside that difference, and the eleven works gathered here are all botanical: flowers and grasses and one thistle, printed at a scale that refuses to treat them as small.
Biography
Willis F. Lee (b. 1948) is a photographer and printmaker who works in Santa Fe. He is known for portfolios in traditional copperplate photogravure and for large-scale photography, and he has taught, lectured, and published alongside his own practice. His subjects have run from the archaeological to the botanical. Copan: A Classic Mayan Ethos Set in Stone, from 1997, is a suite of twelve copperplate photogravures in an edition of thirty. The Floralia Suite is a set of chine collé copperplate photogravures in an edition of fifty. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston holds his Grama Grass II of 1997 and Tulips, Detail II of 1995. He showed here in Flora in the spring of 2018, alongside twelve other artists.
In the collection’s words
Joan Tewkesbury said of these prints that “you can feel them, they are soft,” and that is the whole argument for doing it the difficult way. Lee describes his interest as the interdependence of the diminutive and the colossal, and the botanical work is where that idea is easiest to test. A poppy, a thistle, an amaryllis, a bird of paradise. Objects that fit in a hand, printed until they hold a wall.
There is a second thing this page quietly contains. In 1997 Lee made his twelve plates at Copán. A hundred years earlier, Alfred P. Maudslay photographed the same site and produced the first serious record of its inscriptions. Two men, the same stones, a century apart, both of them working in ink on paper, and both of them on this roster by routes that had nothing to do with each other. We did not plan that. We are glad of it.
Continue exploring
- Flora, and his fellow exhibitors Robert Stivers, Deborah Samuel, and Marion Claire Wasserman
- Alfred P. Maudslay, at Copán a century earlier
- Photographs in the collection and paintings and prints
- All artists at Webster Collection
- All exhibitions at Webster Collection
