Evensong

Micah Schwaberow

Said Schwaberow of his prints: "My images are rooted in California. I want to celebrate my reverence for those quiet, piercing moments when the world stops me with a gasp -- when darkness tips into light, sky touches water, a cloud dances a cool color across a warm field."

"Evensong" is a small color woodcut with a large essence, incorporating most of what Micah loved about the color woodcut and his ability to pay homage to the Sonoma County landscape that occupied so much of his time and energy. He looks to the Pacific Ocean, perhaps recalling his studies in Japan, from the shore. It is sunet and only a tinge of sunlight remains, as the moon sits out to sea. He uses the Japanese technique of Bokashi to blend the colors of the background and the grain of the block to create the subtle movement in the sky. Wispy, ethereal clouds sit quietly in the sky while in the foreground the dark closes in on an inlet.

'Evensong' is a church service that’s traditionally held every day as the sun goes down, marking the passing of another day in faith.

Micah Schwaberow, printmaker, painter and sculptor, was born in Eugene, Oregon in 1948. He studied painting with Maurice Lapp and printmaking with Elizabeth Quandt at the Santa Rosa Junior College in California. In 1981, he spent a month in Miasa, Japan studying traditional woodblock printing and, in 1982, he spent most of the year in Nagai, Japan studying with the Japanese master, Toshi Yoshida, and his master carvers and printers. In September of that year, he was an assistant for his teacher during a three-week woodblock course for foreigners.

Schwaberow gave lecture demonstrations at the University of California Berkeley and at Mills College in Oakland. He has produced a number of boxed suites of color woodcuts, including Tuolumne, Book I, which won first prize in a nationwide competition to commemorate Yosemite National Park. Schwaberow’s figurative works are commonly more monochromatic than his landscapes, with fewer blocks and steps used in the printing process. In addition to his prints, Schwaberow has included a sculptural element to his list of aesthetic endeavors, creating gourd vessels echoing the figures of birds and landscapes.

His work is represented by galleries across the US and is in the collections of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts and the Cleveland Museum of Art. His color woodcut, "Morning Mist, Heath Township", was the 2009 Presentation Print of the Cleveland Print Club. Micah Schwaberow died in Santa Rosa, California on July 11, 2022.