John McWilliams was born in 1941 and currently resides in McClellanville, SC. He received his BFA and MFA from Rhode Island School of Design and is Professor/Director Emeritus of Georgia State University Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design. McWilliams has received numerous awards, including the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in photography. McWilliams’s monograph Land of Deepest Shade was published by Aperture in 1989.

I live and maintain a studio in McClellanville, South Carolina. My work these days is based in drawing and relief printmaking, which I have been doing for more than twenty years. Woodcuts and wood engravings, the primary means of printed pictorial information since the invention of the printing press, have held much fascination for me. The woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer and the German expressionists, the illustrations of Rockwell Kent, and the graphic novels of Lynd Ward and Frans Masereel have been an inspiration. Woodcuts and wood engravings, as they sit on the page, are a world unto themselves.
 
The carved and engraved line has great expressive potential, revealing much about the artist’s intent. The ability to distill meaningful shapes and forms from ideas is an act that surprises and brings discoveries. The process of developing an image into a woodcut or wood engraving gives structure to my life. The image grows through the initial drawings to the carving and then the print, in which the image, if it is good, takes on a life of its own and becomes an open question. It is such sweet irony that, although the act of creating gives my life structure, it nevertheless produces an enigma, a puzzle that others may interpret through their own lives. There are no easy answers. Such is life.