Blanche Wilson

Blanche Wilson was born in 1922 in Salt Lake City and grew up in Portland Oregon. She took art classes all through her school years including Maryhurst College in Portland, Brigham Young University, Weber State University, and the University of Utah. During World War II, she was a draftsman for the Navy. After her marriage to D. Jay Wilson and while raising six children, she taught at the Utah School for the Blind. In 1972 she earned a Master’s degree from BYU in painting and sculpture. She began printmaking in the early 1970s after many years of paint￾ing in oils and watercolor. Over the years her woodcuts developed from small linocuts for Christmas cards to larger black and white images to multi-colored wood block prints, which have won many awards. The prints are in state, university, corporate, and private collections. Being a realist, she finds subject matter everywhere. Both sketches and pho￾tographs are useful in her work with woodcuts. Her output is not large. She may produce four or five new woodcuts in a year. The editions are limited to fifty. All are hand-printed on traditional Japanese printing paper, and she does them as needed.