Artist Statement

Don Hudgins
Artist Statement
My prints are made by hand using soft-carve relief blocks, water-based inks, acrylic paints, and a manual Speedball roller press. The process begins in Photoshop, where I develop compositions from drawing and appropriated historical imagery, then transfer them to rubber printing blocks via used label paper. Fine lines and cross-hatching are carved using bits set in a calligraphy pen holder. I work in predetermined sizes that allow me to mail prints to exhibitions anywhere.

I value craftsmanship in a way that leaves room for the accidental. Overruns, drips, and loose registration are not mistakes to be corrected. They reinforce the visible hand of the artist and connect my work to a tradition that runs from traditional Japanese printmakers through William Blake, M.C. Escher, and Otto Dix. While each print in a series shares a common block, every impression is unique. Color is built through multiple passes through the press.

My imagery draws on the struggles and small indignities of contemporary life: work, superstition, belief, appetite, and the daily effort to derive meaning from a chaotic world. These themes surface in recurring figures: the rabbit, which appears throughout my work sometimes as alter ego, sometimes as bystander; animals rendered as formal portraits or comic protagonists; and symbols like the all-seeing eye, the ladder, and the open door, carrying both folkloric and personal weight. At first glance many of my images are funny. They are meant to be. Humor is a way of hiding challenging ideas in plain sight, and what lands afterward tends to sit closer to home.

I am drawn to series, typically groups of two or three related images on a single sheet, as a format that allows me to develop a theme across registers: air, land, and sea; the surface and the deep; the sacred and the absurd. Ornate decorative borders and flourishes, appropriated from historical sources, frame these images in a way that simultaneously elevates and questions their subject matter.
A newer body of work takes its loose inspiration from the 72 Demons of Solomon as catalogued in the Ars Goetia, specifically the sigils, or summoning seals, associated with each spirit. Rendered in multi-color relief, each print captures three sigils per sheet. The intentional misregistration between color passes produces a chromatic fringing that reinforces the ritualistic, otherworldly character of the source material. These pieces extend my ongoing interest in symbol systems, belief structures, and the boundary between the decorative and the charged.

My goal as an artist is to produce work that speaks across time, images that reward both the casual viewer and the careful one, and that ask personal questions about philosophy, belief, and what it means to be human right now.