Over the past four decades Iowa-born artist John Buck, working out of his studios in Bozeman, Montana, and in Hawaii, has created a large and enormously important body of woodblock prints and rubbings, sculpture, and three-dimensional wood panels. Both his two- and three-dimensional forms are saturated with a visual and spatial richness of images, icons, symbols, motifs, and an intensely lyrical and deeply authentic evocation of both the natual and social worlds. Tough-minded and visually complex, Buck's art comprises a thorough and relentless examination of deeply personal and...

"Multiple backgrounds can form such two- and three-dimensional ideas that they take you to the brink of lunacy, but I have used this rich background and ethnic landscape for creating art. As a student at the University of Minnesota, I often wondered what the study of Russian history, Shakespeare, English literature, or Freud . . . had to do with cleaning onions in Hollandale, Minnesota, picking potatoes in Hoople, North Dakota, or visiting relatives in Michoacan. This diversity of ideas can produce a three-headed monster or an artist, and I chose the latter." -Ruben...