Bruce Waldman
Etchings & Monoprints
Curated by Avraham Eilat & Zohar Nir-Amitin
4.1.07 - 15.2.07

"As long as I can remember, I‘ve had an uncontrollable obsession to make images; to tell stories with pictures; to tell my story. I don’t understand why this is so; I never consciously wanted to be an artist when I was young. I never thought of it as a romantic idea, actually quite the opposite. When I thought about it rationally, it seemed to me that you would have to be crazy to go into the arts.

The art for me has worked as a kind of escape hatch, and has helped me to survive difficult experiences and personal crisis. It has given me a place to hide when I needed one, a place to reflect on things that I have experienced that I did not understand, and most of all it has empowered me to take hurtful experiences and turn them into something positive and powerful; a kind of internal catharsis. I really understand how this works, but I don’t know where I would be now without the art.

One of the things that especially attracted me to the printmaking process in general, and etching in particular, is the kind of textural background plate tone that you can get, which can give the image an atmospheric smoke, or fog. Because my works are emotional, and tend to be a little on the dark side, this helps me to recreate the kind of mood that I feel inside.

I love making monoprints because of the possibility of being wildly spontaneous, and attacking the plate with a reckless abandon. I am very interested in movement, and this allows me to work in a way that accentuates a feeling of movement."

-- Bruce waldman