Marc Cote

When I was in high school, I started thinking of this as my career—more along the lines of commercial illustration or animation—but as I made the shift to printmaking, my interest migrated towards the fine arts, gallery works, and the like.

My intrigue with printmaking began at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where I went to study illustration. After realizing my passion for prints, I later attended graduate school at the University of Connecticut, finishing with a degree in fine arts and concentration in printmaking. After completing the program, I started a job at Framingham State University in Massachusetts—where I am now Dean of Arts and Humanities—teaching printmaking, drawing, and illustration.

My work can be described as “figurative expressionism,” a style concerned with narratives and stories. I started to incorporate sculpture, in particular, woodcut, and have become invested in having wood as part of the final image. I begin my pieces with wooden stumps, most of which still have bark on them. I cut into them, develop them, and allow for some of the bark to remain intact, to become part of the narrative and add engagement to the finished piece. In all my work, materials inform the content. I’m showing process, origin points of where the materials come from, and allowing the figure to emerge from the sculpted form. I infuse printed material onto the 3D part of the form, responding to the bareness of the wood, visual interplay between bark/natural surface and creative surface that is still woodcut—an odd interplay between the source, the material, and the final image.

I am inspired by personal biographical history and familial relationships, such as fatherhood, brotherhood, and child-rearing. I also think about social justice, sometimes inequality, and platforms of privilege. Intertwine all these elements with folk tales, fables, and historical references and a bit of religion, and the result is a new, more dynamic narrative that’s defined by each of its individual parts.