We’re thrilled to share our 2025 Official Artwork with you. This gorgeous wood cut print was created by artist Nick Wroblewski, a Midwest based printmaker of hand cut woodblocks.
Nick’s interest in art was cultivated young by a strong community of artists in Minneapolis, MN, where he grew up. Early experiences in puppetry, painting, and sculpture led to his work as a printmaker. Nick focuses on large multicolor woodcuts and has developed a distinct aesthetic reminiscent of stylized Japanese masters, yet uniquely his own. His work depicts the reverence he has for conversations of the wild and loyalty to the honesty of handcrafted arts.
Nick’s work can be seen in private collections and galleries throughout the country, as well as commercial design and illustrations. He lives in Duluth, Minnesota and prints from his studio near Lake Superior.
When we asked Nick to tell us what made him excited about making artwork for the Wild and Scenic Film Festival, here is what he told us:
“Because I think when I was first asked, it just conjured that experience I had in that area. I think that was the real spark of it for me, especially the Yuba [River].
In years past, I traveled over the mountains to get out to California…I had always visited some friends in that area and spent some time on the river and just really…appreciated it. And then also the work that [SYRCL + WSFF] has done, you know, I love the mission and the themes.
And so, I like the challenge of it…trying to create an image that would be rewarding for my own pursuits, but also something that you all would really find striking and useful and meaningful.”
See the artwork and interview transcript below:
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT:
I am here today with the 2025 Wild and Scenic Film Festival’s official artist, Nick Wroblewski. And we’re really happy to take some time to chat with him about his artwork, his process, and how it aligned with Wild and Scenic this year. And so, Nick, I’m just hoping that you can start out just by telling us a little more about yourself—who is Nick Wroblewski?
Well, I find myself obsessed with this particular art medium of woodcut block printing. I’ve always been interested in visual art from the beginning. I grew up in a really artistic community in South Minneapolis and had a lot of folks around me that were artists of all kinds, performers, visual artists, storytellers, jugglers, these types of people.
And so, I really never had any question that this was, you know, a livelihood that somebody might pursue. I just took it for granted. And that was really inspiring.
I went to an arts high school and that was also really informative. That’s where I started to do printmaking.
I really liked how the art form combined sculpture and painting, two-dimensional and three-dimensional forms. And so, I was just really intrigued by something about it, something about the physicality of creating imagery through sculpture that really resonated with me. And so, I was encouraged early on to pursue that and we had access to a printing press in high school and I was just fascinated with the mechanics of it and the process.
And then I went to art school out east and studied more painting, went a little bit more abstract with sculpture and painting. And then once I was done with that, I came back to this art form and have really been committed since then.
So, here I am. I find myself creating a livelihood from it, which is surprising. You know, I’ve put in the work, but it’s also sometimes like, wow, this is pretty interesting that this has been my calling for this long.
Yeah, that’s awesome. So, how long do you think then you’ve been creating woodcut block print artwork?
It’s so weird to say the actual number because you second guess yourself, because I really started as a sole livelihood around 2000. So, it’s almost 25 years of doing this.
That’s a beautiful thing. So, can you tell us what excited you about making artwork for the Wild and Scenic Film Festival?
Because I think when I was first asked, it just conjured that experience I had in that area. I think that was the real spark of it for me, especially the Yuba.
In years past, I traveled over the mountains to get out to California to do some art fairs. And so, I had always visited some friends in that area and spent some time on the [Yuba] river and just really, you know, appreciated it. And then also the work that you’ve done, you know, I love the mission and the themes.
I like the challenge of trying to create an image that would be rewarding for my own pursuits, but also something that you all would really find striking and useful and meaningful.
When you had come out here, you got to go to the Yuba. I’m just curious if you have a formative memory of the Yuba at all to share.
Oh, well, I haven’t been there in a couple of years, but I got to go out with people who’ve lived there for a long time. So, that’s really beautiful.
I get a lot of little narratives and there’s such a culture around it and such characters. And I guess there’s even people still set up trying to find gold nuggets, right? Or panning.
Water-shaped rocks, like I see here on the lakes in the Midwest, the clarity of the water—there’s something for me as a printmaker where you’re always trying to capture the way that water shapes the land, you know? And so, those two images, the stones are almost water in motion, you know, captured in perpetuity, you know?
Can you walk us through a little bit of, as far as the artwork that you created for the 2025 Wild and Scenic Film Festival, what elements are represented there and any meaning behind those elements that you care to express?
We did a little back and forth trying to hone in a theme or work that I had done in the past that kind of spoke to you all. And so, with the theme, Wild at Heart, for some reason, before, the egrets were sort of in, you know, calling. These egrets were in my mind.
And I wanted to do something that was really elegant but also referred to an animated body of water and maybe a relationship, where there’s two animals, two birds dancing or interacting together and creating, you know, a compelling composition. I was in all honesty, a little resistant to do a completely original design, remember? I was like, well, perhaps we use something that I have, but then you’d slowly work me.
Then, I was, okay, let’s do this from scratch. It was exciting all around, but then it’s just all in for me. If it’s from scratch, then it’s just all in. So I created this image specifically for the project.
And those were the elements that I wanted to weave together. I guess I wanted to balance the elegance of those birds with a real wildness of nature.
And I’ll add that you originally stated, given the constraints of things, I think that I’ll have to keep this a bit of a simpler image. And then very quickly you replied and were like, here’s my first draft and I’m not keeping it simple. And it turned into… I do that to myself so much.
I don’t know what that is. But yeah, it turned into a pretty complex image. And yeah, really happy with how it turned out.
Much of your artwork often revolves around nature and wilderness. Can you tell us a little more about your approach to printmaking and why this technique is meaningful to you and your work and those themes of nature and wilderness?
I just feel like with that medium of woodcut or relief printmaking, there’s sort of a tradition of natural imagery, you know, nature-inspired imagery.
There’s a lot of old children’s books that were illustrated that way that just have a real analog, quality. I’ve illustrated a couple children’s books and I’m really influenced by old books pre-internet, you know, old children’s books that were all hand-illustrated. And they have just an organic, like a soft quality to them where you really can sense the gesture of the artist’s hand.
Even when you carve text or you leave little error marks in the background, it kind of shows… It’s sort of like evidence of a process. So it has its own physicality. And I don’t know, I start to see things, that I experience in the natural world that I feel like, wow, that could be really satisfying to translate through this medium of holding these chisels and drawing this image. Even the reason why I use wood instead of linoleum is because the wood was once alive and so it has its own quality and it has its wood grain and it may allow you to do some things and then it may give resistance to other things.
So it’s sort of like, that’s another thing that I really love about the process is it’s a real, you know, relation. It’s a collaboration between the material and the artist.
As far as the type of wood you use, is it standardized or do you choose different woods based on a project?
For this piece, it’s a specific type of plywood that I used that really lends itself to this medium. It’s sort of a nice blend of soft with enough resilience to hold up under pressure and many impressions.
The wood is called shina, it’s Japanese linden, like a basswood. And so this wood block is the key block that I used to make that image.
Keeping in line with the talk about this technique of printmaking, are there any artists that have inspired or influenced your work along the way? And how would you say that they’ve, shaped your style or choice of medium?
What comes to mind is the artist Gustav Baumann, who was an artist that eventually moved to the Southwest and captured images of New Mexico and Santa Fe and was just a real purist.
I believe that he also ground his own pigments to make his inks. And so he just had this real thread of authenticity that I really appreciate. And he had this incredible discipline and work ethic and beautiful colors that, and a real craftsman really dedicated to a particular way of doing it.
Gustav Baumann’s real colorful landscapes and beautiful scenes of canyons and clouds.
Tom Killian is also really inspiring. His prints are beautiful and I really respect him. I don’t know. There’s something that I really value about that dedication.
And then people like Rockwell’s etchings, woodcuts are really powerful. And go back to kind of the root of this work, which is positive and negative, black and white and composition and how you might achieve a bunch of mid-tones and gradations with just a binary system of on or off or black and white. So those real simple prints are just really informative.
I really love the gradient on this print in particular, actually, like the sky and water gradients there. I wanted to play with an overall theme of blues and grays, but then that little strip of horizon that’s like a gold.
I don’t know, to me, that sort of represents the horizon, you know, optimism or something coming that’s to look forward to.
How would you say your location and sense of place impact the work that you produce? As currently residing in Duluth, Minnesota.
Well, the lake is infinitely inspiring. You know, I feel like bodies of water for me as an artist are enough subject matter for a lifetime. We live on this hill, and so there’s all these waterways, these little waterfalls that come down through the town that are beautiful little places of reflection.
There’s moss and there’s cedar trees and there’s falling water. And so the location and also the perspective, when you’re near such a large body of water, or if you’re in the mountains and you have that sense of space, that’s really inspiring. I mean, I can only work so large within this medium, so it’s always a challenge to try to capture that sense of vastness within a certain framework.
There’s a lot going on in the image I did for you all. It’s a very intricate image, but the challenge is to create that sense of distance and volume. And so there is that, there is a little island or, a little hill off in the distance on the horizon.
That’s kind of inspired by my experience with the lake, in the Northwoods—I could do trees, too, for a lifetime. Capturing the gesture of trees is infinitely interesting to me as well.
I also love snow. Making woodcuts of winter scenes is really fun because all that white area ends up being things, areas that you would carve out. So a woodcut of a snowy scene might just be a few trees in this huge block.
Nice. Yeah, really love your representation of birch trees. Definitely brings me back to youth and my time in the Northwoods. —So what do you think about the intersection of art and activism and why might that be crucial in this moment in time?
Let’s see, that’s a really good question. I’m not really that compelled to make images with humans in them.
With the children’s books I did because it kind of required a character reference. I don’t really feel compelled, to be totally literal, with any sort of contemporary issue. But I do really feel like I want to exemplify beauty and try to capture powerful moments in nature; in hopes that one might be inspired by that, that it might be infectious in the way that it might remind somebody how important natural resources are or that even the word resource is tricky, but that experience. So yeah, there’s a lot of birds in my work, and there’s a lot of metaphor in that too.
I like the idea of trying to capture gestures like I’ve said before in an animal and what type of character, what kind of qualities particular animals exhibit or represent. So, in terms of activism, the times where I’ve really tried to be literal, I felt like it was a different style of work. And so, you know, I do like carving texts and I do like making, you know, slogans or posters or greeting cards.
This is sort of a tangent, but I really love old pop-up cards and bookbinding, so taking a woodcut and creating something that might have a narrative to it that might tell a story that could then also be used as a statement— a statement of action. But I haven’t really been that political with my work. Again, I want it to kind of speak for itself and I want it to just remind people that there is so much out there beyond the internet.
I just look back at all the work, all the literature and visual art that was done before anybody could research it on a computer. And you can’t really say that anything nowadays is so much more incredible than pre-internet—that’s my little political statement.
I think that that’s in line with the long history of artwork, be it photography, painting, other mediums that have inspired activism and people working to care for a location just through its existence.
There’s a rich history of people being awed by these places, and that sense of wonder has fueled movements to protect them. It feels like a catalog of experiences, much like how I view Tom Killian’s work.
How many different perspectives of that particular place exist is incredibly rich, just the different takes on it. And I think it’s in a tradition of Japanese printmaking where you might make 12 different images of a particular mountain—that’s beautiful.
I love the idea of a tree in different seasons or with day and night or different lighting or just the light on the lake can be, there’s so many prints that it’s almost inconceivable. You almost can’t catch up. You can’t.
Well, kind of playing off of that, you know that our festival’s tagline is where activism gets inspired. If you could tell us a little bit as far as just what inspires you day to day.
My studio is about a mile from my house, on a big hill closer to the lake, so I could easily drive there—that’s pretty convenient! But as an artist, I’m often confronted with the pressure of efficiency, especially when my art process is so slow.
How can I become more efficient? Well, wait a second. Do I want to be efficient? So do I walk to the studio? That’s going to burn up a little bit of my time. But then it’s like the transition from the home life with the children down to the studio and I’m really appreciating that. That’s sort of inspiring in itself. I get to see the lake and the sky, get a sense of the day, bring that into the studio.
What inspires me? It’s mostly experiences that I have where I’ll be walking through the woods and I’ll be taken by a particular composition.
You know, you’re kind of dealing in squares and rectangles as a printmaker. To the paper and the press and potential to frame something. So that’s often your viewfinder for how you might experience the world.
And compositions is everything. Right now, I feel like that’s one of the most important things, just the balance of activity with open space. So I may just see a tree with a particular gradation behind it.
And that might be enough to go off of where it’s like, whoa, that is so difficult to try to share that story with somebody else. How would I do that within the parameters of this particular medium? And that’s kind of the important part is you set up all the rules for yourself as an artist or as an artist involved in a particular medium, printmaking. Like, how could I do that with a brayer, with a ruler, that’ll make gradation? And print orange beaks.
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