Nicole Donnely
Alan Pocaro
Alan D. Pocaro is an artist, writer, and educator based in Illinois.
Pocaro is currently Associate Professor of Printmaking and Foundations at Eastern Illinois University and formerly adjunct faculty at both the Art Academy of Cincinnati and Miami University. Pocaro is associated with the New Aesthetics movement, an informal group of artists and writers who emphasize the physical and material nature of art.
Pocaro regularly contributes art-criticism to Chicago’s New City magazine, and his writings have been featured in The New Criterion, New American Paintings, articritcal, AbstractCritical and ART PAPERS, as well as CityBeat.
Artist Statement
Writing and making are inexorably linked.
At the natural confluence of these two rivers of practice, the written and the wrought, lies the promise and possibility of the book. I produce editions like any printmaker and I mercilessly revise verse like any poet. But rather than persist as final products, these impressions form the
raw materials that animate my book-making practice. From the illusion of painterly brush strokes to the half-tone spaces of historic images, printmaking allows for an aesthetic distance that is cool & cerebral, while bookmaking creates experiences that are warm and intimate.
By combining screen-printing, painting, relief, and transfer, my aesthetic approach is analogous to the rapid shifts, curious juxtapositions, and perceptual instability of contemporary life. I enthusiastically embrace the found image; remixing and refashioning the extant to reveal new
features of that which were once considered familiar and understood.
As a printmaker this attitude is both traditional (as in reproductive prints) and contemporary. As a bookmaker, this methodology frequently finds a home base inbound pages of a single signature or humble codex.
But in their contents, I swing for the fences.
Thematically, I describe my work as a series of scenes that chart a nameless place. Part epigraph and aphorism, part Midwestern landscape at dusk. These pieces arise from the gamut of everyday experience, embracing the joys and sorrows of an all too fragile existence. Much of my recent concerns position love as the central dimension of human experience. Falling into it and out of it, coveting it and rejecting it. I can find no emotion (or it’s felt absence) that so persistently colors life’s many stages.
I proceed in the ardent belief that when these elements combine, what will emerge is some new and heretofore unseen aspect of a distant shore.