Talk to most artists and you'll find their careers have rarely been planned. It's usually some chance encounter with a certain medium, a specific work of art or a unique teacher, that determines their artistic trajectory. For Kathy Puzey it was a notice for a woodcut workshop in Florence, Italy. At the time, Puzey thought she was going to become a high school volleyball coach and teach art on the side, but in Italy she worked with renowned woodcut artist Karen Kunz, who convinced Puzey to follow her to the University of Nebraska for graduate work.

Puzey has returned to her native Utah and now teaches at Utah State University, just minutes from the canyons she explored as a child and where she developed an early love for nature. She continues to create woodcuts, enjoying, she says, the surprises that come when working with a once-live material. Her passion for wood is also evident in her three-dimensional work, sculptures that comment on the natural materials they are made of.

Puzey’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States in such locations as the Kansas City Art Institute in Kansas City, MO; Ohio University in Athens, OH; Haydon Art Center in Lincoln, NB; Anderson Ranch Art Center in Snowmass, CO and College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, VA. She was a recent recipient of a Utah Arts & Museum Visual Art Fellowship.

Below are just a few of Kathy Puzey's Prints:

'Rhymes and Reasons' Woodcut, 38cm x 48cm, 2012

Woodcut

Multi Media; multi-media