Artist Spotlight: Jeffrey Hutchinson Fay by Christopher O'Flaherty

Artist Spotlight:

Jeffrey Hutchinson Fay Depicts New England Small Towns

We have collaborated with Jeffrey on three woodblock prints since our launch last fall. This summer we were thrilled to work with him on his most recent large scale print of a Martha's Vineyard Lighthouse during a Big Ink Event in New Hampshire. We had the pleasure of driving up with Jeffrey from Connecticut to help print at Lyell Castonguay's event.

If I Could Talk is the title of Jeffrey's large format woodcut. Using high grade plywood, Jeffrey spent two weeks carving the negative space of the image away, and adding detailed textural marks for the lighthouse. These details create a strong sense of depth and atmosphere, which is evidence of his strong traditional background in oil painting.

Jeffrey Fay is a graduate of the Acorn Gallery School of Art in Marblehead MA. He primarily concentrates in oil painting, but he has also worked in the mediums of etching, acrylic and charcoal. Jeffrey depicts small town scenes around New England in his artwork, and currently has a studio in Willimantic Connecticut.

The Ups and Downs, an oil painting by Jeffrey depicts a row of beach front houses curiously cropped, and masterly drawn with receding perspective into distance. The sky, cut out with cold pure white paint turning the scene into a cloudy fall time day with tourist season long gone. Rarely depicting people Jeffrey's artwork has a strong influence by Edward Hopper. The relation is clear in Essex Cleaners where the space is flattened, with sharp shadows, and empty streets. This lack of figures in Jeffrey's architectural scenes is not due to a lack of skill, but rather to a stronger interest in drawing of buildings and landscape, and then the painting of light.

Earlier this year Jeffrey began to translate this into woodcut as a way to make his prints more accessible, with hopes that anyone who likes his work would be able to afford it. His small prints In Through the Gate and When One Door Opens are available to purchase individually, framed or unframed, or through our Neue Art program.

Summer begins to slip away as a long shadow begins to intrude on this typical New England home in his childhood town of Marblehead. His use of texture against the bold shadow overtaking the house has brought air into a characteristically “flat” medium, and no doubt because of his experience in charcoal and oil painting.

An intensely colored barnyard red square flattens the side of this New England home. In this second iteration in the series, Jeffrey has abandoned his usual atmospheric qualities to embrace the “flatness” that is often associated with western woodcut prints. He has accomplished this through constructing both a frontal understanding of pictorial space, and introducing a compositional red shape.

Written by Christopher O'Flaherty. Please send thoughts or questions to chris@lunchmoneyprint.com