Richard Bosman was about twelve years old when he first made images on a scraperboard. By scoring away the black, he was able to get white lines. He has basically done the same thing when he chose to make woodcuts in 1980. He remembered working from dark to light and preferred the roughness of woodcut to the other print forms.
He liked the Japanese woodblock prints and discovered how speed and the act of cutting became part of the emotional content of the print. Bosman had over 45 solo exhibitions and showed mainly at the Brooke Alexander Gallery through the 1980s. Many of his images were related to his perception of man’s cultural attachment to myths. He said he felt connected to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. He painted and printed in his Brooklyn studio and was fascinated by the lights glaring in the night over the Brooklyn Bridge. This led to the powerful color woodblock print he created for the Print Club in 1996.
The Fitzwilliam Museum of Art at Cambridge University in England used a Bosman print-1983 woodcut Double Trouble-as the cover of its 1999 publication, Recent Acquisitions of American Prints. Bosman’s work recently appeared in the MoMA exhibition of contemporary printmaking.
~ Elaine and Julian Hyman ~