Meet the Artist
Patrick Norton
Printmaking
Patrick Norton has lived in Oregon since 1994. He has always made art and always been interested in the natural world. A self-described generalist, he graduated from Portland State University Magna Cum Laude in 2011 with a BS in Science. He has painted in oils, acrylic, and watercolor, worked in pen and ink, scratchboard, and linocut, and digital methods.
Patrick’s current focus is on linocut printmaking, through online and direct sales of natural history subjects in black and white and in color. He has sold hand-printed linocut art at several local art fairs and would like to do more. He makes linocut prints using traditional methods. He makes a drawing, transfers it via graphite paper to a block of linoleum, and uses gouges to remove the areas not to be printed. He inks the block with a roller, places it in a forme (to assure proper alignment), and lays the paper or cardstock on the inked block. Felt blankets are laid on top, and he rolls the whole set through the press. The result is a reversed (R-L) image of the carved block.
Among Patrick’s many local projects are: natural-history-based interpretive signs in Portland and Gresham, hand-cut rubber stamps for outreach purposes for the City of Portland Bureau of Environmental Services (BES) and others, illustrations for BES and the Xerces Society for Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, and logos for meetings of the Freshwater Mollusk Conservation Society (2023) and the Oregon Chapter of the American Fisheries Society (2023).