Stefan Osnowski

My name is Stefan Osnowski and I am working as a printmaker, specialized in woodcut, but I am also an experienced teacher, giving classes, workshops in Fine Art and special courses in woodcut and printmaking in Germany, Hungary, The Netherlands and Portugal. I lived and worked in Germany and Portugal but since 2016 I am settled in Budapest, Hungary.

The basic idea of all my artistic work is to combine digital and analog media, such as digital photography and woodcut. I am investigating basic digital codes and ways to transform them into analog ones in order to represent phenomena such as time, movement and space on a two-dimensional image. I work with the earliest form of printmaking, woodcut. I am interested in slowing time in this world characterized by rapid movementand an abundance of visual impulses.

All works are made by hand, without the use of any machine and most are monochrome prints. The motifs for all my woodcuts are selected from photographs shot with my simple digital camera. A line screen is set on the wooden panel and the image is then transferred to it. Carving along the lines, changing in width and depth, lifts only the light fields out gradually. Dark or black lines, thicker or thinner, form the basic graphic pattern. The multi-transformed motif – originally derived from a digital photograph – is no longer obviously recognizable on the final print. Depending on the image and position of the observer, it may be noticeable. Only the viewer‘s gaze forms an ambiguous and complete image.

A balance between abstraction and realism is an integral part of all my works. The combination of wood printing – the oldest form of printed imagery – and of digital photography – perhaps the newest way of making an image without even physically printing it – lays bare a very special tension. In some way the original image is transformed into an abstract binary bar code – 1 or 0 – onthe wooden panel.