CHIPS OFF THE OLD BLOCK

Woodcut artist John Carruthers will be honored at the annual gala of the Artists Association of Nantucket

There’s the quintessential Nantucket artwork—soothing pastel scenes of a lone dory in calm water, sea-meets-sky horizons, a rose-covered Sconset Cottage. And then there are the works of John Carruthers—energetic, color-saturated depictions of everyday island life filled with people and movement. “I’m not looking to soothe,” says Carruthers, a woodcut artist who creates one-of-a-kind prints from his carvings. “I really want the viewer to be excited.”

The viewer is. “The colors he uses—they light me up,” says Fair Street resident Maria Roach. One of his pieces that she acquired illustrates the Fourth of July Main Street water fight with the fire engine. “All the kids running, the boldness of the red truck and the children laughing—he captures the joy of the island.”

Summer visitor Darlene LaCroix, who purchased a Carruthers “Race Week” print she saw exhibited at Nantucket Airport, appreciates that his works are “folksy, exaggerated and expressionistic.” LaCroix, who used to work in the curatorial department of the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, adds, “He reminds me a lot of Thomas Hart Benton. [Benton] was a regionalistic artist whose images were of folk in the areas that he knew. I find a lot of that in John’s works. His pieces are of everyday people just enjoying the island. I’m really struck by them.”

Reactions like that no doubt played into Carruthers being chosen as this year’s honoree at the annual gala of the Artists Association of Nantucket (AAN), to be held Saturday, July 15th, at the Great Harbor Yacht Club. He is “totally dumbfounded” by the distinction, he says. “I’m a little off center as far as island artists go.” Indeed, words used to describe his pieces by people interviewed for this article include “edgy,” “intriguingly off kilter,” and “chaotic”; some mention the swirling gusts of wind that you can actually see.

But AAN has embraced him ever since he started washing ashore each summer in 2004. The one-time lead singer for the band Alter Boys, he says that “I was going through your classic midlife crisis. I quit everything I had and wanted to be a teacher.” He placed a call to AAN’s Arts Program director at the time, Liz Hunt O’Brien, who liked what she heard. “I hired him on the spot,” she says, “over the phone, without meeting him, without seeing any of his work. He seemed so genuinely nice and honest. And humble.”

Her hunch paid off. Today, Carruthers is beloved by his students of all ages, young children, teenagers and adults alike—not only at AAN but also at The Storm King School in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, where he chairs the Visual Arts Department and serves as artist in residence between summer stays on island.

The teaching has paid it forward for him in return. “You always need to be reminded of the foundations,” he says. “Space, color, line, value, shape. That constant teaching is showing me. Then I go back to my studio and do it myself.”

What he carves is not what he draws—a jeep with surfboards coming out the back, the Buck-A-Shuck Guys at the Sand Bar—but everything that is not the drawing. From there he uses different-size rollers to paint various colors onto what is left of the wood’s surface—the drawing on top after the rest has been carved down. Then he puts rice paper over the painted wood and rubs it with a spoon to make sure the ink is transferred to the paper. “It can’t go through a press,” he says. “You won’t get that density of color.” In fact, he says, “when I say it’s a print, people think I run it through a press, and here are twenty of them. But each print is an individual, handmade item. Once I wash the paint off the wood, I’ll change colors or do something different with color for the next print. I may put in a sky—or not.”

AAN’s artistic director, Bobby Frazier, says that “the craft of woodcutting is unique because what you’re doing is carving a three-dimensional sculpture on a board and then using it to print a two-dimensional print on a piece of paper. He has to do it thinking of white space and dark space.”

Do what, exactly? Carruthers starts by drawing a scene on a piece of wood and then carving. The wood might be pine he bought at a big-box store or perhaps some mahogany or cherry wood that he upcycles. “I’ll go to a junkyard and find old bookshelves, old wood that’s dried out,” he says. “I’ve taken apart chests of drawers, chairs.”

Adds Kathleen Knight, who exhibits Carruthers’ work at the Gallery 4 India, “He’s got a lot of engineering going on in his brain while he’s carving those scenes.”

People say they can see what they like about him in his works. “He’s a very kind and compassionate guy, and I think that reverberates…There’s a warmth in the work besides the bright, punchy colors,” says Peter Greenhalgh, who runs AAN’s Cecelia Joyce and Seward Johnson Gallery on Washington Street, where Carruthers is also exhibited. Knight puts it this way: “I think he celebrates in his work. He’s got a very positive outlook, and he has a very happy outlook in his artwork. He shows the good times in Nantucket, like the

Cisco Brewery or the action on Main Street.” She also likes that he works on wood. “There are not many artists left that work the way he does,” she says. “John is really the only one working in this medium on Nantucket.” The singularity of Carruthers’ pieces and the warmth and downto-earth charisma that come through them also resonated with Kit Manigan’s father, now passed. “My dad purchased one of John’s works more than ten years ago,” she says, “but then he started taking his classes. He really was just mesmerized by John and his approach.”

Manigan, who with her husband, Mark, is serving as this year’s gala chair, is taken herself. She says that “he can do beautiful landscapes”—last year her mother bought what she says is a “very pretty and serene scene of blue hydrangeas at Steps Beach.” But “a lot of his stuff is action-packed, a snapshot of everyday life—the cars or trucks coming off the ferry,” for instance.

For this year’s gala, which will raise funds for emerging artists and help sponsor classes at AAN, Carruthers created a triptych that will be the highlighted piece in a live auction. One part is Sankaty Light, something of a departure from the kinds of things he usually focuses on. The second image, he says, “is guys in one of those lifesaving rowboats kind of pushing out into the surf in the middle of a storm. And the last is two kids on Jetties Beach reading books, with the Lynx just offshore. The girl is reading Moby-Dick and the boy, a book on pirates. “I go to Nantucket, and that’s what I see,” he says, “references to humanity. That’s what I’m interested in.”