Louis Ocepek is an artist, designer, and professor of art. He was born in Detroit in 1942 and grew up there and in neighboring Warren, Michigan. He studied design and fine arts at Wayne State University in Detroit, benefitting from the teaching and encouragement of Professors Peter Gilleran and Olga Constantine.
Following his graduation with a BFA degree in 1964, he attended graduate classes at the Art Institute of Chicago, and then returned to Detroit, beginning his professional career at the John F. McNamara design studio in the Fisher Building. At McNamara's he worked with several of Detroits best designers and illustrators, in particular Chuck Wilkinson. Ocepek moved on to earn his graduate degree from the University of Iowa in Iowa City in 1967, studying painting, design, typography and printmaking.
He began his teaching career in 1967 at Montana State University, in Bozeman, Montana. While there he helped develop a professional design program, as well as an interdisciplinary printmaking program. After a short stint working in Vancouver, BC, Ocepek in 1971 accepted a position at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, teaching graphic design and screenprinting. He worked productively in both design and fine art, exhibiting his work extensively while also maintaining his freelance design career.
Returning to Montana State University in 1983, he again further developed the professional design and printmaking programs. Ocepek became a professor at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces in 1985, establishing a flourishing graphic design program, as well as teaching printmaking and other fine art courses. He assisted in establishing the graduate program and served as Department Head for six years. Ocepek was awarded the Westhafer Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2000. Retiring in 2002, he continued to occasionally teach in the University Honors Program.
He is a dedicated studio artist, working in a variety of media, exhibiting regularly in group and solo exhibitions throughout the country, including solo exhibitions at the Portland Art Museum and the El Paso Museum of Art. His work is included in the public art collections of Oregon, Washington, Texas and New Mexico.
Among recent exhibitions, Ocepek exhibited work in Tejido Fronterizo / Border Tapestry, at the Chamizal National Monument in El Paso, Texas. In 2016 he collaborated with Mary Ellen Wolf on Tableaux Parisiens, an exhibition of direct intaglio images from Paris, at the Unsettled Gallery in Las Cruces, NM. In 2017, he showed prints with Joe Barela in an exhibition titled The Chamber of Curiosities, also at Unsettled Gallery. In 2017, his work was included in the exhibition, 3rd Annual Hand Pulled Prints, the Current Practice in Printmaking, at Site: Brooklyn, NY. His 2021 solo exhibition, titled Nexus, New Work, brought drawing, painting and digital imagery together as limited edition prints.
Ocepek’s design work has been included in many publications and exhibitions, including Graphis International and Graphis International Posters, Zurich, Switzerland, the New York Society of Illustrators, and the International Exhibition of Poster Art in Brno, Czechoslovakia. In 2002, his book, Graphic Design: Vision, Process, Product was published by Prentice Hall Incorporated.
His work is included in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Portland Art Museum, the Raymond Jonson Gallery at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the Art Museum at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
Several self-published books of Ocepek's art and design work may be viewed at blurb.com. including Louis Ocepek, Ink on Paper, 50 Years of Printmaking; Nexus, Chromogenic Prints, 2017-2021; Typographics, Sixteen Typographic Compositions; Abecedarium, An Illuminated Primer; and Around the Block, from Conventional to Digital and Back.
Ocepek's working process is one of 'theme and variation,’ continuously seeking new and deeper thematic interpretations. In keeping with a musical analogy, his work often pays homage to the tone and etherial nature of form and spirit. Theme and variation is the thread that links change with continuity.
In terms of images, his goal has been to find a creative direction deep enough to sustain continued exploration. Ocepek's effort is directed toward making work that is accessible on at least two levels; one, the purely sensual pleasure of form expressed as color, line, shape and texture, and, two, a deeper, more subjective experience of fluid compositions existing in infinite, etheric space; trying to make visible the universal forces that energize and create the physical realm; abstractions with aspirations toward the metaphysical.
Drawing and painting from nature, man-made objects, archaeological relics, found objects, musical notations, signs and symbols, Ocepek's expression takes on a personal vocabulary of form and color.
In addition to drawings and paintings, he works in a variety of print media; screenprints created by the successive overprinting of multiple stencils; relief prints using photopolymer plates; and direct gravures, intaglio-printed in the traditional manner on an etching press.
He also makes low-relief constructions, hybrid structures incorporating printmaking, painting, found objects and digital images, often including words to create a narrative content; words juxtaposed against pictorial images, each influencing the other.
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