Frederick O’Hara Museum Collections

Frederick O’Hara, Riders, Woodcut, 14″ x 22″

Born in Ottawa, Ontario, Frederick O’Hara painted in modernist representational and abstract styles, but is best known for his prints. He worked extensively in color woodblocks and later took up color lithography. He was affiliated with the Tamarind Institute in Los Angeles and Albuquerque, and taught printmaking. One of his students, New Mexico artist Elmer Schooley, said of O’Hara’s technique, “…he was real big on this business of listening to your material, and I’m no sooner going to impose myself into those big gestural lines and all this kind of stuff that people do. Instead of that, he would flow ink onto a stone and then see what kind of form that suggested, and then put it down and print something else on top.”