JULIE HELLER GALLERIES

Ferrol Sibley Warthen (1890 - 1986) was a member of the Provincetown Printers. She was a teacher and an artist who studied under Blanche Lazzell starting in 1950. 

 

She spent her summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts within the thriving art colony of Provincetown at that time. The Provincetown Printers art colony was started in 1915 by B. J. O. Nordfeldt, and a group of other artists who had fled Europe. 

 

Warthen's medium and technique was primarily white line woodcuts on paper, a technique she learned from Blanche Lazzell, who had learned from B. J. O. Nordfeldt. White line woodcuts are done from a single block of wood, as opposed to regular woodcuts that are done from multiple blocks of wood. Each color is done separately and applied to the paper in separate applications. By nature of the technique, these were much harder to accomplish in most cases than the traditional woodcut technique.