Wood Engraving Wednesday
TONY DREHFAL
Wisconsin wood engraver Tony Drehfal delights in intricate, tightly-focused, textured surfaces as demonstrated in this 17.5 x 12.7 cm (6.9 x 5 in.) print entitled Dovetail, selected by my Wisconsin colleagues Tracy Honn and Jim Moran for inclusion in the Fourth Triennial Exhibition 2020-2022 of the American American wood engravers society, the Wood Engravers’ Network (WEN). This image is from the catalog for that travelling show.
Drehfal learned wood engraving from Ann Arbor wood engraver and WEN founder Jim Horton in 2002, and after a 35-year career as a college photographer, Drehfal retired in 2015 to focus exclusively on wood engraving. He has quickly become a leader in the wood engraving community, and is a member of both WEN and its venerable British counterpart, the Society of Wood Engravers. Of his process, Drehfal writes:
Landscape and the minute details of the natural world serve as the primary inspiration of my wood engravings. Photography, drawing and engraving interweave in my creative process. I take photos often during hikes . . . near my home . . . in northern Wisconsin. Over time, recurring visual themes accumulate; birch trees, decaying stumps, knots and bark textures, and reflections in woodland ephemeral pools. I then draw and expand a theme in my sketchbook, using photos as reference. There is a point when photo references are put away and the process of drawing and wood engraving take on their own natural cadence towards a resulting print.
View other posts with engravings from the WEN Fourth Triennial Exhibition.
View more engravings by members of the Wood Engraver’s Network.
View more posts with wood engravings!
– MAX, Head, Special Collections and juror for the WEN Fifth Triennial Exhibition.












