Artists > Glenn Wolff
Artists Statement
I learned to draw by copying DC and Marvel Comics. When my mother, also an artist, saw what I was doing so passionately she started giving me books on the masters- da Vinci, Durer, Rembrandt, Goya. That was it for me, and I set about learning how to draw and paint. Not sure how well I do them yet, but at my ripe old age I feel lucky that I’ve made a living with art for most of my life.
My career has included illustration, mural painting, exhibiting as a fine artist, and art education. The boundaries between those areas used to seem firm but I no longer worry about that. My materials can include ink, watercolor, oil & acrylic paint, copper plates, linoleum, paper, canvas, wood, and tin.
Each piece I do is a meditation–on landscape (interior and exterior), creatures (us and not us), and sky (often twilight- that state of imperfect clarity that exists between daylight and darkness). I ponder them and our relationships and estrangements, with what my friend Jerry Dennis calls “equal parts desolation and plenitude, pessimism and optimism, joy and despair — pretty much the conflicted 21st-century heart.” More times that not I come through, and hope the viewer does too, at peace, realizing what Pema Chondron says, “Inspiration and wretchedness are inseparable.”
John Berger, in “The Sense of Sight” wrote, “Art is an organized response to what nature allows us to glimpse occasionally.” These are my responses to those moments, when at twilight, in a river, I see the whole universe on the back of a brook trout.
Glenn Wolff grew up in Traverse City, Michigan. He studied Printmaking at Northwestern Michigan College, and received his BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. His career began in New York City as an illustrator for The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Central Park Conservancy, The New York Zoological Society, Audubon, and numerous book publishers. He has contributed illustrations to a number of books by award winning Michigan author Jerry Dennis, and has collaborated artistically with numerous environmental organizations including the Grand Traverse Regional Land Conservancy, Wings of Wonder, The Leelanau Conservancy, The Watershed Center, The North American Prairie Conference, and Inland Seas Education Center,
He now lives and works on Old Mission Peninsula in Traverse City, Michigan, and has just retired as head of the Art Department at Northwestern Michigan College to concentrate on fine art, book illustration, printmaking, and music.
