Kalamazoo Gazette. Sunday, December 15, 2002

Prints present romantic view of Lake Superior
By Cedar Lorca Nordbye

The Greater Kalamazoo Arts Council gallery in the Epic Center is adorned this month by the beauty and skill of traditional and seemingly antique woodcuts by Mary Brodbeck.

The 19th-century Japanese tradition that inspired Brodbeck was referred to in its time as Ukiyo-e, or "Floating World," and was epitomized by series of prints such as Hokusai's 36 views of Mount Fuji. The most famous of these prints is his "Great Wave" of 1823.

With her "Thirty-six Views of Lake Superior," Brodbeck has embarked on a course that pays homage to Hokusai's project. She presents a dozen multicolored prints of the lake, each made up of flat areas of color that come together to give the illusion of great depth.

In a display case in the gallery, Brodbeck provides two examples of traditional Japanese prints and a narration explaining how she was inspired by a "process book" she found in a used bookstore to travel to Japan to study The book reveals the step-by-step creation of a multiblock woodcut, one color at a time.

She also displays Hokusai's "Great Wave" to provide reference for her Lake Superior series. The presence of this print, with its crashing, frothing wave, about to smash down on a fishing boat, with Mount Fuji still and tiny in the distance, provokes a comparison between Brodbeck's images and the 2-century-old Japanese practice. The Hokusai prints are an investigation into a deep philosophical question: Who are we humans and what is our relationship to the world we live in?

Mount Fuji rests in the background of all of Hokusai's images, immobile and unchanging, providing a direct contrast to the fleeting affairs of man, featured in the foreground. In the case of the great wave, fishermen are trying to survive treacherous surf while the mountain in the distance is a reminder that ultimately fishermen will come and go, waves will come and go, but the mountain will continue to be.

Both Hokusai and Brodbeck remind viewers of "geologic time," which contextualizes our human affairs and prompts humility. While Hokusai juxtaposes the fleeting affairs of humans with the timelessness of the mountain, Brodbeck gives us landscapes devoid of any evidence of the existence of humanity.

In this regard, I see her work as vastly different from Hokusai's. Her work is romantic, nostalgic and quintessentially American. In many ways her images of Lake Superior here have more in common with the 19th-century landscape paintings of Church and Binghampton than they do with the Japanese artists who inspired her.

They present a virginal landscape, unpopulated and for the taking. They are not devoid of human presence, for while there is never any evidence of humanity depicted, there is always the implied presence of the artist, quiet and alone, the pioneer, the individualist contemplating the landscape for the taking. Yet there is nothing in the work that overtly hints at the artist's self-consciousness of this romantic relationship to landscape.

I wonder what will come next in Brodbeck's series of images of Lake Superior. She has written in her artist's statement that her intention is to encircle the lake. Will we ever see bridges, buoys, docks or Coke cans, ships or telephone poles? Clearly, the intentional exclusion of those elements is a position, a statement.

As human beings, our relationship with the natural environment has long been problematic, and the problems have been quite pronounced in our treatment of the Great Lakes. While I sympathize with the impulse to use artwork to wipe away our difficult presence, I wonder how these prints could give form to our complex relationship with these great bodies of water.