Bryan Nash Gill

Untitled, 2004

Monotype

Image size: 9 3/4" x 19 1/2"

Paper size: 22 1/4" x 30"

Estimated value: $2200

Printed at CCP by Anthony Kirk

Bryan Nash Gill (1961 - 2013) was a Connecticut based artist who worked primarily with wood, in the form of relief prints and sculptures. Born in Hartford, Connecticut and was raised on a farm in Granby, Connecticut. He attended Westminster School and in 1984 graduated from Tulane University in New Orleans where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts, with a focus on glassblowing.[3] He moved to Italy to learn stone carving before returning to the United States to study at the California College of the Arts, earning a Master of Fine Arts in 1988.

Although Gill began his art career in glassblowing, ceramics and landscape drawing, gradually turned to sculpture, particularly with wood. He briefly lived in New York City but returned to New Hartford, Connecticut, where he constructed a two-story studio adjoining his house in 1998 from wood timbered from his own property. Gill began creating woodcuts from tree cross-sections in 2004. Most of his woodcuts were created from dead or damaged tree parts that he collected and took to his studio to prepare cross-sections of the wood for relief printing. In 2012, Chronicle Books published Woodcut, a book which displays a selection of Gill's prints; it was named one of The New York Times Magazine's best books of the year. An exhibition by the same name, composed of 30 of Gill's prints, was displayed at the Chicago Botanic Garden in early 2013.

Gill's work has been displayed at the New Britain Museum of American Art and DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, and he was commissioned to create installations for Expo 2005 in Japan and the World Financial Center in New York. He was a fellow of the California Arts Council and twice received grants from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. He was profiled in Martha Stewart Living in 2012 and was the focus of a documentary video produced by the magazine. Bryan was an active artist member of the Center for Contemporary Printmaking until the time of his death.