Café Gallery
Wildness: Drawings and Prints by Fred Montague
Over the last four decades, Fred Montague’s activities in art, writing and teaching have centered on fostering environmental awareness and sustainable practices. Montague’s goal, in this quickly changing, more complicated world, is to offer a revitalizing link to our ecological context — Nature. In original pen and ink drawings, limited edition prints and books, he creates windows onto the natural world: highly-detailed stippling and hatching define the head of a bison or a river rock bed; a chat between ravens comes alive in the more abstracted and bold images that are characteristic of his woodcuts.
Montague’s work is derived from traditional methods and stand in contrast to today’s mass-production, fast-information processes. He prints his woodcuts and photolithographs on a 1913 Golding letterpress in his workshop, his books are often hand-bound and some of his drawings take hundreds of hours to complete. In each medium, capturing the simple beauty of the natural world, Montague offers countless reasons why we must act now to save the wildness that surrounds us.
