annalise gratovich | carrying things from home

Written by Miranda K. Metcalf | Published 7 nov 2019

The woodcuts of Annalise Gratovich are explorations of home, history, culture, family stories, and the formation of all of these things. They are a delight for the eyes where bold patterns meet soft colors and instantly recognisable as her work. To see them is akin to spotting someone across the room the instant you walk into a party and getting that “I don’t know you, but I need to” drop in your stomach. A rush of contradictions, her woodcuts feel ancient and completely new, gendered and androgynous, communicative and coded. One series in particular, “Carrying Things from Home,” is a monumental set of eight woodcuts, three by five and a half feet each, of a totemic beings that encompass a sole identity of an individual icon. The color that has been meticulously applied with hand-dyed chine colle gives the prints both a depth and a softness. The end result is work that is impossible to place in time, genre, gender, culture, or any of the cues we look for when understanding a work, yet nonetheless feels familiar and inviting. 

Whenever an artist has a distinctive aesthetic to this degree, I am fascinated by the process with which they developed it. So often in the arts we see only the finished product, masterpieces that seem to have sprung forth into the world fully formed like Athena from Zeus’ head. We do not get access to the backstory of development and creation. When I called Gratovich in her home in Austin to record her forthcoming episode of the pine|copper|lime podcast, I had no idea how far back that backstory went, beyond her own lived experience into World War II and Nazi-occupied Ukraine. Coming to understand this story made me realise that her woodcuts are about displacement and finding a sense of home through stories, all deeply connected to her own family’s history.

Gratovich works in Austin, Texas, and she grew up just outside of the city in a family of musicians. Both of her parents were career artists in the field, and her brother also has followed in their footsteps. While seeing the musician’s life first hand throughout her childhood instilled in her a knowledge of the dedication it takes to be a career artist, Gratovich herself was always drawn to the visual arts. She started community college at sixteen, because like all reasonable people, was bored and unhappy in highschool. However, she still didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life. She had been attracted to science in particular, and was planning on becoming an astronomer before she caught her first glimpse of printmaking in the basement of Austin Community College. It was the presses themselves that first caught her eye, “Ooo, look at all these cool toys, I want to play with these,” she remembers thinking. While it has been written many times before, it bears repeating that to go from science to the arts isn’t as big of a jump as some would lead us to believe. The way Gratovich describes it, they both require what she calls “stretchy thinking”, a particular kind of flexible problem solving and creativity. She kept taking printmaking classes until finally she knew that she had to go to undergrad for printmaking. 

Like many of us, she was intrigued by the process and was then captured by the community and the sense of excitement, encouragement, and inclusion it fostered. Gratovich is now a leading figure in Texas printmaking and beyond. She works at the Blanton Museum of Art as their preparator for works on paper, matting and framing art for display and archiving. She is a curator of printmaking exhibitions around Texas and she is also on the board of several non-profits including the fabulous Print Austin and a newly founded community print shop in Marfa, TX: Marfa Community Print. All of this makes her both a participant and key player in the sense of home that such community can provide.

When I ask her how she came to develop her unusual and striking style, Gratovich explains that she has always been drawn to figurative work, both making it and collecting it. She found her way to her current series through an exploration of rounded figures, filled with emotion, empathy, and compassion. They were sweet to the point where one instructor rather insultingly suggested that perhaps she should look into developing Hallmark Cards. Undeswaded, Gratovich continued to follow her instincts to create the images, until one day it dawned on her that she had been drawing the matryoshka dolls from her childhood. Those elaborately painted wooden toys, each opening in the middle to reveal progressively smaller, equally meticulously painted figures. Gratovich is the daughter and granddaughter of Ukrainian refugees, and the matryoshka dolls were a huge presence in her life growing up. “If I wasn’t drawing, I was playing with these dolls: opening and closing them, stacking and unstacking them,” she says.

In her current body of work, Gratovich has taken that familiar figure with the rounded head and oval body to new heights. The elaborate patterning she utilizes is directly derived from Ukrainian embroidery where each pattern tells a different story and the rounded headdresses are kokoshnik, traditional formal regalia. Despite being so directly inspired by her specific heritage, she says that often people from different cultural backgrounds will see their own iconography in the images, as certain themes in the patterns transcend specific cultures and even though her figures are almost entirely androgyous, men tend to see them as male and women as female. This all speaks to the fact that Gratovich has managed to create imagery that is concurrently specific and universal.

For Gratovich, the series is about identity, our losses, our hopes, our best attempts, and our search for belonging. All of which come together most concretely in her piece titled “The Musician,” a woodcut that is specifically in reference to the stories of her family. Gratovich believes we use storytelling to create a sense of identity when physical objects are lost, as in the case of the Gratovich family who fled the Ukraine leaving behind memorabilia behind. During World War II it was her grandfather’s job to be on the frontlines overseeing the disassemblage of factories, removing anything that could be useful to advancing Axis troops. While doing this job, he was separated from her grandmother, until the night he showed up on her doorstep and they took off with nothing but the clothes on their backs and what they could carry. As they traveled, her grandfather would play the accordion and her grandmother would sing to entertain those they found along the way. They would ask to be paid in Lucky Strike cigarettes, which they could then barter on the black market for food, clothing, and shelter. In one particular story Gratovich remembers hearing, her grandparents traded cigarettes for a suitcase full of cherries. The two eventually found their way to the United States with the help from The Tolstoy Foundation. The tale is immortalised in “The Musician”, with the accordion player taking center stage, a cigarette in their mouth, bells on their ankles, and alcohol and dice in the case.

Alongside the doll-like figures, Gratovich would find plants appearing in her work as well. Yet it wasn’t until recently that she realized these botanicals were her mother’s side of the story. Her mother becomes the plants through both literal and metaphorical pathways. While she is an avid and talented gardener, she also, like all mothers, represents what it is to grow and nurture while remaining rooted. Gratovich’s mother is now retired, but was a concert pianist in her career and seeing the dedication and the hours spent in the studio required to live an artistic life greatly affected how Gratovich saw her future self. Her mother also instilled in her a love of growing and nurturing plants, and that activity is still a big part of Gratovich’s mental health best practices. (I would just like to plug right now Gratovich’s instagram as the place for hot plant content.)

Just as she nurtures her practice and her plants, Gratovich is also a builder and a provider for the great printmaking scene of Austin. She has been an organiser from the beginning for Print Austin, which is a month long event that happens in the city celebrating and educating people about printmaking. They partner with local galleries to make sure that printmaking is on display during those dates, as well as hosting artist talks, demonstrations, and other pop-ups. Knowing that gallery spaces often overlook printmaking, this event becomes a catalyst for not only the paterons but also the institutions of the area to fall in love or become reacquainted with printmaking.

Between her rich studio practice, her job in the museum, her life as a plant mom, and her work on the boards of printmaking nonprofits, Gratovich is a busy woman and the interested in community creation is at the heart of her practice. As we talked, she told me that until recently she didn’t have an internet connection in her home, and she liked it that way. In the evenings she would pour herself a glass of wine and look at the art on her walls or in her flat files, but not just glance at it, really look at it. Looking at the mark-making and the colors, and be present with it. I offhandedly suggested that perhaps we could start a tradition of people undertaking this once a month, and she didn’t hesitate to jump on board and suggest that she adds another obligation to her list of practices. “We could create a great name that people, when they get back online the next day, could hashtag so they could share the art they were looking at,” she says. This completely demonstrates for me the way community building and story creation is in her blood, in the stories she tells, in the way she lives, and the way she creates.

Annalise’s website

Print Austin