Featured Artist - "Phillip Parotti"

"The Southwest is the inspiration for the majority of my woodcuts," Phillip Parotti says.  "From time to time, I choose other subjects, but artistically as well as physically, I prefer to work in the geographical region surrounding my home."   Born and raised in the mountain mining town of Silver City, New Mexico, Parotti graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1963.  He then spent the following four years at sea, serving aboard destroyers in both the Pacific and Atlantic fleets.   In 1967, Parotti opted to change professions, took a commission in the Naval Reserve, and entered graduate school at the University of New Mexico.  In 1972, after completing both the M.A. and Ph.D. in English, he accepted a teaching position at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, and he remains there today as a professor of English.

"I work with both oil and water based inks," Parotti says.  "My preferred medium is Bass wood, but I use
Poplar and White Pine, and for some subjects, I work with linoleum blocks.  Because mine is a small operation, which is to say that I hand rub each print, my editions seldom number more than 50 prints.  As a rule, I try to divide my work fairly evenly between simple black and white images, and more complicated prints in color.  For color printing, I sometimes work by the reduction method, printing light colors first before cutting the block away in order to print darker colors over the lighter ones.  At other times, I cut individual blocks for each color, using a simple register and the key block method which allows me to transfer images from the key block onto several other blocks that will be used in the process.