... By 1935 he had made his way west to the Bay Area, where he taught at Mills College in Oakland and quickly became part of the region’s thriving art scene. He even served as director of the San Francisco Art Festival and, a little later, founded the Mother Lode Art School in Columbia, California, in 1956—a fitting spot, right in the heart of gold rush country.
The themes of California’s mining past show up again and again in Surendorf’s work, and Columbia, where he lived and eventually passed away in 1979, became his home base. He was a printmaker through and through, starting with traditional woodblocks before switching to “battleship” linoleum, which he toughened up by freezing before engraving it with steel tools. His process was as unique as his subject matter, and between 1934 and 1971 he created more than 250 prints. His skill didn’t go unnoticed—Art Digest once named him one of the top 25 woodblock artists in the world.
Today, his work can still be found in museum collections, including the Oakland Museum of California and the Mills College Art Museum. Surendorf’s prints capture not just the look of California’s landscapes and history, but the grit and craft of an artist who carved his own path, quite literally, into the blocks he worked with.
