Black Bear is a woodengraving created in 2020 by American printmaker Richard Wagener (born 1944). It is pencil signed, dated and editioned 19/28. Black Bear was printed by the artist on a sheet of ivory Zerkall wove paper and the image measures 4 x 4-1/8 inches.
Black Bear is one of twenty-six wood-engravings Wagener produced for the 2021 book Cascadia. According to the Nawakum Press website, Cascadia is a contemplative exploration and celebration of wild places in the Pacific Northwest. This book is a remembrance of what was lost, an appreciation of what is left, and a celebration of what could be. Forests are not eternal. For all their solemn stillness, they constantly change, evolve, die, and regrow. But they are persistent, and they always strive to return to an intricacy that is both evocative and instructive. William Dietrich wrote a prose mediation The Lost Forest and Christopher Herold contributed thirty haiku poems.
This is a marvelous portrait of the American black bear with its thick black coat and lighter snout, staring at and almost daring the viewer. The black bear is native to North America and typically lives in forested areas but will roam in search of food. Wagener engraves each line individually into the end-grain of the block, not with a multiple line tool. When asked if he had encountered his bear in the wild, Wagener responded: “The Black Bear engraving was based on photographs taken at zoos and an unfinished engraving that I started many years ago. Trust me, if I encountered this bear in the wild, my first thought would not be to take a photograph.”
Richard Wagener was born in Texicana, Arkansas in 1944. He studied biology at the University of San Diego and earned an M.F.A. in painting from Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. In 2006, Wagener established the imprint Mixolydian Editions for his own fine press projects. He collaborated with David Pascoe of Nawakum Press, Santa Rosa, California, co-publishing three fine press books, one of which, Loom, earned the 2016 Carl Hertzog Award for Excellence in Book Design.Wagener has also produced a number of engraved bookplates that have been collected internationally. He designed the logo for the XXVII FISAE Congress held in Boston in 2000. His bookplates have been featured in Print Magazine; “Contemporary Ex-Libris Artists,” an article by James Keenan, that was published in Portugal in 2003; California Bookplates by Robert Dickover, published by the Book Club of California in 2006; and Three Centuries of the American Bookplate by James Goode, the catalog accompanying a show of bookplates at the University of Virginia from 2010.
A notable American wood engraver, Wagener's works are held in over 100 public collections in the United States and England. He was awarded the Oscar Lewis Award for contributions to the book arts.
