Portrait Series - Leon Hicks (NEW)
Portrait Series VIII #2, Leon Hicks

Portrait Series VIII #2

Artist

Leon Hicks

Nationality

American

Heritage

African American

Medium

Intaglio Etching

Date

1976

Dimensions

30 x 21 1/2 inches

Edition Size

AP prints in this edition

Printer

Leon Hicks

Provenance

Brandywine Workshop and Archives

Location

Philadelphia, PA

About the Work

From the Artist

The New Faces portrait series are [my] responses to the deeply rooted iconic African aesthetic modes initiated in American Black "daily" life, its stylistic natural aesthetic. The New Faces theme is referenced from the 1970s, and it is a product of researching African artistic icons and their designs which were literally lifted and grafted into the "New Faces" Black African-American cultural initiatives.

The New Faces series portraits were photographs, female and male, that were intentionally traced from the original photographs [that I] developed from [my] own camera photographs [that I] had taken from real-life experiences. These photographs allowed [me] to generate "New Faces" (images), and transform them from their photographic camera content, from real-natural to forms that express real-humanistic "iconic" Africanesque expressive portraits and iconic Back decor, which became the "object" and personal stylizing of the African generic Black African American iconic decor.

The New Faces, new stylized African "generic" Black African American iconic "portrait" decor [emphasizes an understanding of] intaglio printing that was developed by Professor Mauricio Lasansky, [my] mentor and printmaking teacher at the University of Iowa (1961–1963). [Intaglio] is an approach to producing artworks using metal plates, including burin engraving, acid needle point etching, etc...Lasansky taught the precepts that intaglio printmaking concepts [align with those of] modern art... The medium consists of its material, tools, and fabrication, manufacturing, and building-constructing processes.
—From Brandywine Workshop and Archives records 

Art is an intellectual endeavor. It is the affairs of the mind and imagination that reconcile art. The skills needed, honed, and developed in the pursuit of art, real art, begin in the mind and then subsequently become technique. I was born in 1933, and on Christmas day of this year [2021] that will be exactly 88 years ago. In almost 90 years of life, I have concluded that the single most important word for the process of art is serendipity, and I believe my work to be serendipitous.
—Excerpted from http://www.621gallery.org/2021/01/leon-hicks/, accessed 6-24-2021

About the Artist

Leon Hicks

Master printmaker Leon Hicks grew up on a small farm in Alachua County, FL, near Gainesville. He earned a BS in painting and sculpture from Kansas State University, Manhattan, and an MA in painting and an MFA in printmaking from the University of ...

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