I'm Marc Horovitz. I grew up in Denver and have lived here for most of my life. Art in one form or another has always been important to me, whether doing it myself or enjoying the work of others. I have dabbled in many aspects of it over the years and pursued two or three of them in depth. I work out of a studio in my house, where I live with my wife Barbara.

Marbled paper
I’ve been marbling paper for over 20 years. I was first introduced to it in 1979, when Barb and I first went to Great Britain and Europe. There we were fortunate to meet and spend time with William Chapman, the marbler for Sydney Cockerell, the eminent bookbinder in England, and also Michel Duval, a highly respected marbler in France. After meeting them, experiencing the magic of the marbling process, and being inspired by their work, I decided to pursue this as an avocation myself. Over the years I was able to learn the process and produce papers to my satisfaction.

I love paper marbling for many reasons. Its long history and tradition is appealing, as is using traditional materials and methods to produce the papers. Pattern has always fascinated me, and marbling paper is a great way to explore this area, whether it be the formalized designs produced in combed patterns or the wild, semi-random, sometimes surreal designs produced by the stone patterns. Marbling is also a wonderful way to explore the study of color — how colors can be combined to create mood and emotion. The finished product — the marbled paper — is actually just a raw material to be applied to other forms of art and craft. I enjoy using my papers in another of my interests, book arts.

Wood engraving
Printmaking has been a long-time interest and I have done a great deal of screen printing in the past. I’ve always been a fan of block printing — linoleum and wood — and became acquainted with wood engraving around 2014. Historically, this process was, for decades, the standard method of producing a printing block for illustrating books, posters, and broadsheets. The old masters, people like Thomas Bewick, produced astonishingly good work of almost photographic quality.

Wood engraving, for me, is an opportunity to investigate graphic imagery in the things I like, primarily architectural and industrial subjects. I like to play with contrast, shading, and rhythm in my prints. The hours of work to first produce a drawing, then to cut the block, I find both relaxing and centering.