Paintings:

   

   Two Thoughts:

1st Grade, Mrs. Ingold would jar me from my thought with, “David Hefner you are staring out the window.” Even when she did so in a gentle voice – it was shocking and I would jolt back with everyone laughing. So I learned to look at the aged wood desk top, and there they were: Robinson Crusoe, Bible stories, the Cloud-islands, Greek myths from star maps, dinosaurs and scores of different species of fish rising from the depths within the woodgrain. My primary art activity is still, mainly, looking at woodgrain – floating and seeking connections to sleeping thought. As a young man I taught kindergarten for seven years. Everyday we shared dreams after nap. Then we would paint and share the paintings as another form of dream sharing. Five-year-olds most often just begin painting and find their subjects, compositions, and color choices intuitively within the process of moving paint. My woodgrain paintings are an attempt to explore these aspects of pure process. From 1998 to 2013 I mainly made woodcut and then woodgrain prints before switching back to painting as the direct medium of what gets out of the studio.

 

Prints:

 

 The works on this website are a selection of hand-pulled woodcut prints from 1998 – 2013. All prints are on 100% cotton Arches cover stock and are printed in lithographic ink. The abstractions of 2010 were printed in watercolor and/or lithographic ink and layerings of the two mediums together. The prints are numbered to document the number of prints pulled from individual boards.  The numbering does not reflect an addition as all prints were made as hand-pulled mono prints exploring a range of coloration. The print numbers listed do not reflect the number of available prints off any board as the prints that have been sold were selected by the collectors’ preferences. Print numbers do reflect the order the prints were pulled.  Number of prints from an individual board did not exceed 12 until the abstractions of 2010 that have a greater range of variations and in one case reached 22 prints. (32 prints were pulled from the “Back-board of the ’39 Phone-box” but the prints are intended to be grouped in sets of four to comprise 8 images.)



I sincerely hope you will enjoy exploring the work,

hefner, dr. d.r.