(a street in Collonges-la-Rouge, France)

Bernard Brussel-Smith

Bernard Brussel-Smith uses wood-engraving to create this dramatic cityscape, a street in Collognes-la-Rouge, France. Using delicate, complicated linework he manages to contrast the blacks, whites and grays, ending up with a composition that, though small in size, reads realistically close-up or as a precisionist abstraction from across the room.

Woodengraver Bernard Brussel-Smith was born in Greenwich Village, New York in 1914. He discovered engraving when he attended courses at the New School for Social Research in New York, studying under woodengraver Fritz Eichenberg beginning in 1941. He proved adept at the precise medium, and Eichenberg soon elected him for the position of teacher's assistant. Woodengraving would become Brussel-Smith's preferred medium for the next five decades.

From 1957 to 1958 he studied with famed Atelier 17 founder and printmaker Stanley William Hayter in France, on a Cresson Fellowship. Brussel-Smith gained inspiration from his surroundings there, and he would return to the south of France every year, summering with his family in Collonges-la-Rouge, a village whose architecture and landscapes would become a recurring theme in his work.