SAY IT WITH WOODCUTS

LOT of people would like to have A good original art in their homes, but few can afford it. A Montevideo-born artist named Antonio Frasconi has found a personal solution to the problem: he does woodcuts. Frasconi, today the U.S.'s foremost woodcut artist, makes 10 or 15 prints of a cut, sells them for $25 to $125 each. Such prices have brought him a far wider public than most painters can boast. This week, 34 of Frasconi's best woodcuts start a year-long tour of U.S. museums, sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution. The three prints opposite reflect Frasconi s fascination with Manhattan's Fulton Fish Market in the shadow of Brooklyn Bridge.

Antonio Frasconi, 34, seems a paradoxical fellow. He has happy brown eyes and a sad black mustache, an air of contentment and a sighing voice, a habit of absent-minded wandering and a craftsman's power of concentration. Says he: "An artist must be aware of the comic strip as well as of the serious side of life." Frasconi divides his time between Southern California (where "everything is wide open") and Manhattan ("it's all concentrated like a sardine can"). He sketches constantly in street and field "There is so much going on," he sighs, "so much material for an artist! You go back a hundred times to a place like the Fish Market, until you know just how a man lifts a box, say, or how the place looks before dawn. Then you're ready to make a picture--to put your own feeling into it. If many different kinds of people like the result, maybe it's good."

Frasconi's simple and humble working philosophy is close to that of Japan's great woodcut artists, Hiroshige and Hokusai (18th and early 19th centuries) who also made cheap prints of familiar scenes. If his work is far from rivaling those old masters, it does meet similar challenges in a similar spirit. And no living woodcut artist puts a clearer sense of place mood weather and human activity into his pictures than Frasconi.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.