Description

The sitter in the lithograph Old Man reappears in this woodcut, a much more complex composition. The elderly subject is now a model for a group of five students who work in the foreground; in the background, the Kalamazoo River flows along the rear of the building. Hewit’s woodcuts usually feature blank faces, reflecting the anonymity of modern life, but here, the subject has recognizable, individualized traits, a bald head, and a large nose. In the black crayon drawing and the lithograph, the lines connecting the sitter’s nose to his chin and his right eye to his cheek are depicted naturalistically whereas in the woodcut the lines partition his face into variously colored sections. While lithography allows the artist to draw freely and achieve a wide range of tones, woodcut fosters a less detailed, more generalized and stylized design of simplified, flatly colored shapes.