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ALUMNI PROFILE<\/b><\/p>\n
Douglas Piper \u201909<\/b><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div> By\u00a0Sara Ann Hutto Grant \u201917<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div> Piper carves out a place for himself in Greenville\u2019s art scene through block prints<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div> \u201cWood does what it wants to.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Douglas Piper, a Greenville-based block print artist, reflects on his earliest medium. He remembers childhood days spent exploring the \u201cmassive, massive workshop\u201d of his grandfather, Clair Harold Hunt, a woodworker in retirement. Piper\u2019s small hands whittled popsicle sticks alongside his \u201cPaw Paw\u2019s\u201d larger projects.<\/span><\/p>\n Piper still wrestles with wood today, cutting, chiseling and chipping each block print piece of art in his studio, which sits on the Reedy River in downtown Greenville\u2019s Art Crossing galleries. One of Piper\u2019s favorite pieces is \u201cThe Most Exciting 25 Seconds in College Football,\u201d a joyous study in nostalgia.<\/p>\n \u201cIt takes a view of the stadium with all the balloons in your face and all the festivities as everybody\u2019s running down The Hill,\u201d he says. \u201cI wanted to create a print that honored that tradition.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n For this piece, Piper opted for a linoleum block (his other preferred medium) over wood because it allows for a more detailed and precise final product, necessary for the many balloons etched into each layer.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201c[Linoleum] is very easy to carve, and it does exactly what you want it to,\u201d Piper explains. \u201cWhereas wood is organic, so as you carve, it can splinter, or you may discover knots \u2014 who knows?\u201d<\/p>\n Depending on the detail and size of the project, carving can take \u201canywhere from a couple of days to two weeks,\u201d and more often than not, Piper is drawing inspiration from his best-loved muse: the great outdoors.<\/p>\n \u201cI did a tiny little series of where I\u2019d want to retire,\u201d he says with a smile. \u201cIt\u2019s typically at the foot of mountains.\u201d<\/p>\n When the carving is done, Piper rolls ink onto the block and presses it to paper. Or maps or cardboard, whatever he\u2019s experimenting with. \u201cI can either roll it through my printing press,\u201d he says, \u201cor I can take a spoon and hand-burnish it.\u201d<\/p>\n In February, Piper opened an exhibit at Greenville\u2019s Sift Gallery titled \u201cSkies and Shorelines,\u201d a collaboration with his mixed-media artist wife, Meredith Piper, who works just a few studio doors down from him. They met in her hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana, when she was an art teacher and he had recently graduated from Clemson with a packaging science degree. And when Piper lost his grandfather in the mid-2000s, she inspired him to pick up his inheritance: carving tools.<\/p>\n Together, the Pipers have turned their shared passion into a profession. But they still make time to refill the creative well. At the end of March, they finished a monthlong artist-in-residency program in Provence, France, where they traveled and created alongside other artists.<\/p>\n When asked what his grandfather would think of where his grandson, and his woodworking tools, are now, Piper laughs: \u201cOh, I think he would just be tickled. He would probably be asking me to carve a lot of his furniture out if he was still making it.\u201d<\/p>\n With that in mind, Piper plans to keep creating, carving out that obstinate wood \u2014 and making it.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div> Douglas Piper carves out a place for himself in Greenville\u2019s art scene through block prints<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":24937,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,8],"tags":[159,243,1430,2827,2828,2829,3405],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-24936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumniprofiles","category-my-clemson","tag-alumni","tag-art","tag-greenville","tag-summer-2022","tag-summer-2022-alumni-profile","tag-summer-2022-alumni-profiles","tag-woodcut"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2022\/06\/Douglas-Piper.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24936","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24936"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24936\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24936"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=24936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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