Prints and Art Pieces
The art of Juan Verde, another of my pen names. Street art inspired prints and paintings.
These prints are cut, burned, and held in place by hand—wood, ink, light, and time doing their work without apology. The collection moves between woodcut and cyanotype, between carved line and chemical stain, but the throughline stays the same: reduction, restraint, and tension. Figures emerge and disappear. Landscapes hold their breath. Nothing is over-explained.
There’s a pull toward contrast—light against shadow, sacred against ordinary, stillness against pressure. Old forms show up here, but they don’t stay intact. They’re worn down, fractured, made to sit in the present. Each piece carries the mark of process—the cut that went too far, the exposure that shifted, the surface that refused to behave. That’s the point.
This is work about what remains when you strip things back. Shape. Gesture. Presence. The rest gets carved away.
2024
Our Lady of Tikrit
Reduction Woodcut
A striking reduction print rendered in red, black, and white, Our Lady of Tikrit carries the weight of icon and fracture at once. The face is divided yet whole, sacred yet unsettled, echoing both ancient devotion and modern dissonance. Sharp geometric cuts and layered textures create a sense of tension, as if the image has been carved from memory rather than drawn. The limited palette intensifies the emotion—blood, shadow, and light held in uneasy balance—while the stylized features evoke both reverence and unrest. This piece stands at the intersection of faith, history, and identity, asking the viewer to sit with what is broken and what endures.
2025
Narrow Passage
Woodcut Print
A solitary figure emerges from the dark, carved in stark white against an engulfing black field. The body is elongated, almost weightless, reduced to gesture and contour rather than detail. Limbs taper into shadow, as if the figure is slipping between presence and absence. There is no ground, no horizon—only a vertical corridor of light where the human form briefly holds.
The woodcut’s restraint sharpens its impact. Each cut feels deliberate, leaving behind a figure that is less seen than revealed. It carries a quiet tension, like a breath held too long, or a moment caught between concealment and exposure. The result is both intimate and distant—an echo of the human body passing through darkness, leaving only a trace behind.
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2025
Blackwater Quiet
Woodcut Print
A narrow ribbon of water bends through the mangrove, catching what little light slips past the tangled canopy. The trees lean inward, roots and limbs crowding the edges, holding the channel in a kind of hush. Every mark feels cut with purpose—grass etched in quick strokes, branches clawing into the pale sky, the surface of the water broken into shifting fragments of light and dark.
There is no movement here, not really. Just the suggestion of it. A place where sound dies early and the air sits heavy, where the path ahead curves out of sight and asks nothing but patience. The print carries that stillness, that low country tension, where the land and water blur and time slows to something older, quieter, and watchful.
2025
After the Glass
Woodcut Print
A figure leans into the edge of a table, caught in the hard contrast of light and shadow. The body is reduced to silhouette—spare, deliberate, almost architectural—while the room gathers around her in fragments: a window, a pair of glasses, the suggestion of a floor tilting out beneath her. Nothing is fully stated, everything implied.
The composition holds a quiet intimacy. There is a pause here, a moment just after something spoken or nearly said. The light cuts across her form like a boundary, separating interior from exterior, presence from retreat. The woodcut’s rough lines keep it honest—no softness, no excess—only the weight of a body, the stillness of a room, and the faint echo of whatever came before.
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2026
Hit Me Up, Shawty
Cyanotype
A baroque cherub, lifted from another century, pauses mid-thought with a phone pressed to his ear—caught between ornament and interruption. Rendered in deep cyanotype blues, the image feels weathered and immediate at once, as if time itself has been dragged across the surface. Scratches, breaks, and chemical ghosts fracture the scene, turning classical softness into something restless, almost impatient.
There’s humor here, but it isn’t light. The sacred language of old-world beauty collides with the blunt, casual rhythm of now. The cherub no longer whispers to heaven—he calls, he waits, he lingers in the quiet tension of unanswered connection. Past and present collapse into a single surface, worn thin, still reaching.