Roped, Crossed, and Hatched

Gordon Waverly Gilkey

Gordon Gilkey weaves a series of twisted double lines to create a dramatic white on black maze. It is like a fabric, beginning to unravel, a metaphor for many things. Gilkey etched the white lines into the plate as an intagilo, but rather than printing the lines, he inked the surface of the plate to get this image. It may also exist as an intaglio, with the background in white and the lines in black. This impression is a proof and possibly never editioned.

Gordon Gilkey was a professor at and later dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Oregon State University. Upon his retirement in 1977, he donated his expansive collection of prints and drawings to the Portland Museum of Art. He became the museum’s curator of Prints and Drawings and the Printmaker in Residence at Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, Oregon.

In 1993, he and his wife founded the Vivian and Gordon Gilkey Center for the Graphic Arts at the Portland Museum of Art. Gordon Gilkey died in 2000, but his legacy remains an important part of the Portland and national print world.