Emily Lang

Walking into the main entrance of Penn State Abington’s Woodland building and turning to your left, you’ll be greeted by a gallery of playful monster prints. The artist is Orest Luzeckyj, and this is his exhibition, A Bunch of Monsters. A Business Marketing Management major, Luzeckyj displays his skills as an Art minor through his printmaking, mostly of detailed woodcuts.  

I spoke with Luzeckyj, unravelling the passion and story behind the Woodland exhibition. 

First of all, could you tell me a bit about yourself, and your exhibition? 

So the show, A Bunch of Monsters mainly focuses on my work in printmaking, which I worked on for about a year; I think I started in the summer of 2022 and ended this past summer.

I was introduced to printmaking through the Introduction to Printmaking course here at Abington, under Professor Bonnie Levinthal. She introduced me to the craft; I was really interested in woodblock printmaking, and she was so encouraging, so I continued to develop my skills. I think in total there are 66 woodblock prints that I’ve made, all relating to the theme of monsters. Then, I won an award; I was actually nominated by Professor Levinthal for the Thomas Smith and Eileen Walton Smith Award for Achievements in Arts and Humanities. And then, Professor John Thompson asked me if I was interested in having my own show in the Woodland lobby area, and I said “Absolutely.” And it led to that. 

So, can you tell why you decided to focus on monsters? 

I don’t know, I’ve been drawing monsters my whole life. It’s kinda in a way like part of my identity as an artist, like the way I express myself. I don’t really know why I do it. I guess it’s just something that’s unique and can separate me from other artists. I’m just interested in it– you know, there’s so much to do with the idea of monsters too, like a human can be a monster, an animal can be a monster. You can do so much with it. I don’t know. Yeah, I don’t know. (laughs)

Just a side note, but when I first saw your art, I think what immediately came to mind was Where the Wild Things Are, or The Teacher from the Black Lagoon. 

Yeah, I get that a lot with the woodcuts, with Where the Wild Things Are. I also grew up watching, you know the show, Aaahh! Real Monsters. It was on Nickelodeon, in I think the 90s? That’s one of my influences, like I grew up watching that show. My parents, they were always so encouraging even at a young age, and I was drawing monsters back when I was like two years old. 

So would you say that you have any other influences or inspirations for this exhibition in general?

So for the woodcuts, which I guess are like the focal points of the exhibition, there’s this Ukranian artist– because I’m Ukranian– Jacques Hnizdovsky, and he works in woodcut. My family has purchased a lot of his work, built their own collection, and they have it all over my house, and I guess it’s seeped into my subconscious. I find it as an influence the way he plays with shape and pattern– it’s simple, yet very intricate. That was something that I was trying to imitate with my woodcuts.

For the monotypes, along with the drawings that are shown in the intersection, my influences are the artist Willem de Kooning and Francis Bacon. They’re like the main influences for those. 

That was also something I noticed. In your art, I see a … lot of delicate work that was put into each piece … a lot of these monsters are also so unique from each other, from their facial expressions to their postures, like a fingerprint in a way. How are you able to do that?

That was one of my goals– I didn’t want them to look the same. The main idea for making all the woodcuts was to be able to make a big composition with all of them. In the lobby area, there’s the one artwork with, I think, 20 woodcuts, and they’re arranged in a composition– that was the main idea. I just wanted to play with composition and color, and I wanted to have enough variety to make it interesting. 

Each woodcut, I think I would spend like a day just drawing the design, and in a way, every image just led to the other one, so it was just a process of moving forward, recognizing what I did before and trying to think of something new. That was basically it; it was just consistency, you know, once I finished one I would start another the next day just to keep the ball rolling.  

It also depended on the way I was feeling at the time, what I was inspired by. I think drawing my own individual monsters for so long, I think I just have enough experience to have a bunch of different ideas. I always like to just generate new ideas. 

Have you ever hit any art block while you were working on this exhibition, like were there any times where you got stuck doing one of them, or when you couldn’t generate an idea? And how would you deal with it? 

I didn’t get any art blocks. I think I would sometimes scroll through the woodcut Reddit, just to see what other people were doing, and just see different techniques. 

There were some woodcuts that I had to scrap. There’s so many factors that come into play, like if the blade isn’t sharp enough, it’ll tear the wood the wrong way and you’ll lose all the tiny details. And there’s one I did in particular– the whole woodcut, I finished everything except for the eyes and I did the eyes, and then the eyes tore, so the eyes basically just fell off the piece of wood. And I just had to move on, I put it down. I just made a new one. 

What would you say is the hardest part of putting it all together then? 

The hardest part? Let me think about that… It’s hard to say, because to me there’s not really a hard part, it’s kinda like every part’s the same. I think I believe in a hard work beats talent mentality, and it’s kind of like an obsession. Because I don’t have a job, I just do this. It’s something that I’m so interested in and also I have the opportunity now that I’m in college. I commute to school so I don’t really need to support myself, so I figured if I could spend all my time doing what I actually want to while I don’t have that many responsibilities, I might as well should and I should work my hardest.  

Do you have a particular favorite print or piece that you’ve made? 

I really like this one:

But I like ‘em all, you know? But I do like the monotypes. It’s separate from the woodcuts– so you know the lobby area and the sections of the show, the ones all the way closest to the window, those two big artworks?

That’s not a woodcut, it’s a monotype, which is a different form of printmaking. It’s where you get a piece of plexiglass, and then you cover it in ink, and then what you do is you subtract ink, you take ink away from the ink plate or you add ink to make your desired image and then on that ink plate once that image is finished you put that on a paper. It’s basically like painting. Personally I like those the most. I think they’re my most recent– I haven’t made a woodcut in close to a year.

Do you have a role model or an influence, not just in art, but in life in general, like someone you look to for advice? 

My parents– anything my mom says about my art I listen to because I know she’s giving me her honest opinion. And both my parents work so hard to provide for me so I just don’t want to waste the opportunity that I have. And also with printmaking in particular, Professor Levinthal. I also look up to other artists, just inspired by what they do and their standards, like they’re great artists. And anybody who’s doing what they want to do with their life and is happy with what they’re doing, I look up to them as well. 

What’s next for you, once this exhibition ends? Do you have any other projects or any plans in mind? Do you plan to do another exhibit somewhere? And where do you hope to be post-grad? 

So I’m taking my first oil-painting course, and that’s the new direction I’m going into, making big oil paintings. I want to try to build my Instagram account– I feel like if I had a good following on an Instagram account, it’ll give me a good advantage in getting a gallery placement or another exhibition, and I’m hoping in the future I can make more money off my artwork.  

Finally, this was a question I was supposed to ask earlier, but do you have a story or a message you wanted to tell with your exhibition? 

Work hard (laughs). I’m working hard. There’s no message really. It wasn’t really anything like a critique on society or anything. I used it as a way to develop my skills and interests. That’s basically it. 

You can view A Bunch of Monsters in the Woodland lobby and Lares Intersection until March 1st, 2024.