Volcanoes: Paintings and Prints by Louis Pohl
May 23 - September 23, 2003

The paintings and prints of Louis Pohl (1915-1999) are powerful statements of the artistâs deeply felt connection to his adopted island home. They also maintain a delicate balance between nature and abstraction, and thus evoke both a specific sense of place while also suggesting something universal.

Pohl was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1915 and graduated in 1940 from the Cincinnati Art Academy where he studied lithography and also taught. Pohl first came to Hawai`i on December 8, 1941 as a Navy Seabee, assigned to paint camouflage on warships in Pearl Harbor. He made Hawai`i his permanent home in 1945 as he began a career as an artist and teacher. He taught at Kamehameha Schools, the University of Hawai`iâs Hilo campus, the Honolulu Academy of Arts, and in his own studio from 1961 to 1979.

It was during the 1960 summer session in Hilo that Pohl had an opportunity to witness a volcanic eruption, a life-changing event that provided the inspiration for an extended series of paintings and prints, though it would be several years before the artist actively began to work with the images and sensations he had absorbed through a vibrant series of what he considered mental snapshots. Working with keen observation filtered through memory allowed Pohl to work flexibly with his preferred subject of nature, making considered adjustments in color, composition and visual focus, distilling images into symbols of an energy that embraces and transcends a moment of observation, an occasion of immediate experience. Pohl also acknowledged feeling a spiritual presence, perhaps visits from Pele herself, as he worked on these paintings and prints.

Pohl is known both as a superb painter and an innovative printmaker, and a synergy exists between these two arenas of artmaking, where painting is informed by a sense of graphic distillation and printmaking is enriched by a sense of rich surface and a distinctive palette. Pohl developed a very personal and technically complex process of making mixed-media prints, using his hands as well as a baren (a tool used in Japanese woodblock printing) to create multiple layers of color, a fitting parallel to the evolving geology of the island places he loved and never ceased to explore.