Portland artist wins World Fantasy Award for her woodcut prints

Earlier this month, Liv Rainey-Smith became the first Oregonian to win a World Fantasy Award for “Best Artist.” Rainey-Smith now joins a pantheon of World Fantasy Award-winning writers and visual artists that includes Stephen King, Edward Gorey and fellow Oregonian Ursula K. LeGuin.

Oregon ArtsWatch recently profiled Rainey-Smith, whose achievement is all the more notable for the thousand-year-old artistic craft the Portlander specializes in. Rainey-Smith uses blocks of wood that she carves by hand, coats in ink, covers with paper and then rolls through an etching press to make prints featuring mythological creatures or otherworldly scenes laden with skulls, ravens and other macabre symbolism.

Six of her original woodcut prints and descriptions she wrote for them are included in “The Dagon Collection,” an anthology published last year that was nominated for a 2025 World Fantasy Award and inspired by a short story from pioneering horror and fantasy writer H.P. Lovecraft. Rainey-Smith talks to us about her award-winning art and the childhood health struggles she overcame that inform and inspire her work.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Earlier this month, Liv Rainey-Smith became the first Oregonian to win a World Fantasy Award for “Best Artist.” Rainey-Smith now joins a pantheon of World Fantasy Award-winning writers and visual artists that includes Stephen King, Edward Gorey and fellow Oregonian Ursula K. LeGuin.

Oregon ArtsWatch recently profiled Rainey-Smith, who is a woodblock printer. Her art often involves mythological creatures or otherworldly scenes laden with skulls, ravens, and other dark and fanciful symbolism. Liv Rainey-Smith, congratulations and welcome to the show.

Liv Rainey-Smith: Thank you.

Miller: What did it mean to you to win this particular award?

Rainey-Smith: Honestly, just being a finalist was amazing. Looking at the list of artists who have been finalists, not necessarily winners, Edward Gorey, Alan Lee, Brian Froud – these are the artists I grew up on.

Miller: Literally.

Rainey-Smith: Yes.

Miller: So to be mentioned alongside them and then to win an award that they won, it meant something.

Rainey-Smith: Absolutely. It’s hard to put into words, doesn’t seem quite real. I’ve worked all these years making these woodcuts and I make them because I feel like I have to create. It’s a deep and important part of me, and to be recognized for it is, well, wonderful.

Miller: Can you describe the steps involved in making a print from a woodcut?

Rainey-Smith: Well, conception of the idea, of course. Sketching. I have occasionally in the past sketched directly on the wood block using the patterns in the wood grain as [an] inspiration point because, you know how it is, you could see faces in the wood,pareidolia, of course.

Miller: Oh wait, you say, “Of course.” I don’t even know that word, what’s pareidolia?

Rainey-Smith: It’s the human instinct to see faces in things like clouds.

Miller: There’s a word for that?

Rainey-Smith: Yes.

Miller: Pareidolia. OK. All right, that is the best single fact I’ve learned this week. OK. And you see something and including a piece of wood, you may see a face there and you could use that.

Rainey-Smith: Right. But most of the time, I’m usually sketching on paper, with the pencil, and once I have a sketch that I like, I transfer it over to the wood block using some transfer paper, which leaves red lines on the wood. I’ve typically prepared my wood ahead of time with a little bit of blue stain to make it darker. And that’s just to help as I carve. It makes it very obvious which parts of the wood have already been carved.

Miller: You sort of skipped ahead here, but am I right that for wood blocks, you carve away the parts that are not going to be the inky image, the part that will turn into the positive image, and you don’t carve the parts that are the image itself. Did I put that correctly?

Rainey-Smith: Correct.

Miller: OK, so you’re making a positive print that will take the ink that you can then push onto a piece of paper.

Rainey-Smith: Yes. The blank spaces in the woodcuts take the most time. It’s a process that takes some time to get used to. When I first started it at Oregon College of Art and Craft, it was extremely challenging. You have to think in mirror because when you print, you’re getting a mirror image of what you’ve been looking at. And of course, you also have to think in the black versus white, where we’re used to making a mark that is dark, cause we use pencils, we use pens. We are not used to using a knife and making a white mark. So yes, to get a black line, I have to carve around the line.

Miller: So you were at OCAC when you did this for the first time.

Rainey-Smith: Yes.

Miller: What did you like about it? I mean, it seems like you just described some of the challenges. It was a different way to think about an image. You had to think about the negative as you’re making the positive, but clearly there was something about it that grabbed you. What was it?

Rainey-Smith: I’ve always gravitated towards art forms that require a little bit more force. I was born with some birth defects, including facial paralysis, only one ear, and a little bit of delay in the nervous system. I think, I’m not quite … It’s harder for me to have a light touch on something. I tend to drop tools if I’m trying to work lightly, but media that requires a little more force, such as metals, ceramics and woodcut, that I’m better with.

Miller: Literally pushing harder, it works better for your nervous system.

Rainey-Smith: Yes.

Miller: And wood absolutely requires that.

Rainey-Smith: Absolutely. I’ve worked with a relatively soft wood, so it’s a bit lighter on the body, but it still requires that sort of concentration and application of force. And it was a real delight to discover an art form that is more three dimensional in how you work, but gives you a two-dimensional result at the end.

Miller: So that makes a lot of sense as you were describing it as a very real physical set of reasons for gravitating to this. What about the resulting images that you get from woodcuts? When I look at your work, I guess one thing that stands out is, I feel like a lot of them could have been made 500 years ago, both in terms of style and in terms of the vision. There’s something wonderfully classic about them. Did that attract you to the medium as well?

Rainey-Smith: Absolutely. I’ve always loved history and ancient art, and old woodcuts in particular. There’s something about the Renaissance era woodcuts in particular. I like the ones that are not as refined that have facial expressions that, say, aren’t quite right for the situation and …

Miller: What do you like about that?

Rainey-Smith: The world is a strange place. And I think because I had a lot of strange experiences as a child – I had to have open heart surgery when I was 4 – I was aware of my own mortality at a really early age. That gives you a slightly different perspective on things and I tended to be drawn towards things that were a little weirder, a little stranger. And that includes art.

Miller: How do you think the serious medical issues that you had to deal with as a very young child affected the kinds of images that you are still drawn to?

Rainey-Smith: Well, I still have a, I think it’s 1983, National Geographic magazine that had an article about the Aztecs that I glommed onto as a tiny tot because there was an illustration in there of a human sacrifice with a heart being taken out of a chest. And I related to that because I knew I was going to be having heart surgery.

Miller: How old do you think you were when you saw that?

Rainey-Smith: Probably about 3 or 4.

Miller: You saw that before you were going to have heart surgery.

Rainey-Smith: Yes.

Miller: And did that sort of meld in your mind that in some way that’s what was going to happen to you, your heart was going to be taken out of your body?

Rainey-Smith: It had a sense of familiarity to it, yeah.

Miller: You’ve talked in the past about how dreams have played a role in your art as well. What is your relationship to dreams?

Rainey-Smith: I’ve remembered my dreams every morning when I wake up. I had sleep paralysis issues as a child and a teenager. So one of my earliest memories is actually waking up with a weight on my chest, and having the blankets drawn off of my face, and finding myself face to face with a really ugly, slimy, brain-like thing. And it was very real. I know now it’s a sleep hallucination, but when you have those paralysis experiences, they have an element of being almost more real than reality feels.

Miller: What is sleep paralysis?

Rainey-Smith: It’s when you wake up and you can’t move. It’s a normal function of the body to not be able to move in your sleep …

Miller: So you don’t act out your dreams.

Rainey-Smith: Right, except in sleep paralysis incidents, you’re still kind of dreaming. So you might be able to open your eyes and see your room as normal, but you’re still dreaming. So images, things that are happening in the dream appear to be transposed on reality.

Miller: As you’ve been talking about all of this, I haven’t gotten any sense … you haven’t mentioned fear at all. And I’m wondering if that’s because decades have passed and you’ve had time to process this and to think about this now as an adult, or if fear is the wrong word for what you’re describing. If you didn’t feel fear even then exactly.

Rainey-Smith: Oh, I felt a lot of fear then. Up through, I’d say my early to mid-twenties, [I] could not sleep with the lights off in my room. Going to bed every night was difficult. I didn’t want to go to sleep because of these experiences. It’s taken a long time to grow out of that, and my understanding is that it’s pretty normal to age out of that. And the fear lent an effect of needing to befriend the frightening things. I’m sure that’s a large part of why I love monsters and spooky things at this point. It’s because it was a sort of reality that I lived with every night. And when you can get more comfortable with that sort of imagery, it’s not as frightening.

Miller: And now your art is full of monsters – I guess is one word for them – but it’s fascinating and it makes perfect sense as you’re describing this, that you would say that you’ve become friends with them because they don’t seem scary looking at them now. They’re fantastical. They have different pieces of different animals put together in amazing and, in some ways, very old mythological ways, but they don’t seem terror inducing. They’re weird and fantastical, but not necessarily terrifying. What’s your relationship with these creatures now? What do you get from them now?

Rainey-Smith: I tend to think of them as fun at this point. I guess there is an element of joy in my work. I do love horror. I consume a lot of horror novels and movies. But I personally appreciate horror with an element of beauty or fun. And that’s what comes out.

Miller: Is Portland a good city for that?

Rainey-Smith: Oh, it’s a wonderful city for it.

Miller: About a dozen years ago, you made a bunch of prints for a book called “Arcanum Bestiarum” by Robert Fitzgerald. Can you describe that book?

Rainey-Smith: It is a sort of a cult bestiary. The original medieval bestiaries were all basically done by the church and they’re explanations of the different qualities of animals – the good moral qualities and the bad moral qualities. So the “Arcanum Bestiarum” was a modern, bestiary about different occult practices, witchcraft, different beliefs regarding the animals.

Miller: Do you have any favorites from that book of the ones that you made?

Rainey-Smith: The owl is a longtime favorite because I love watching people react to it.

Miller: What do you see?

Rainey-Smith: People either see one side or the other. It’s a close up of a great horned owl, except half of the face morphs into a human skull because owls are considered psychopomps. They’re able to travel between the worlds of the living and the dead. So what I’ve noticed when people walk up to it and see it for the first time is that they either ask me why the owl is blind in one eye, or they go, “Oh, cool, a skull.”

Miller: What do you see?

Rainey-Smith: I see both. [Laughs]

Miller: When you accepted your award recently at the World Fantasy Convention, you talked about generative AI. What’s it been like for you as an artist, a very physical artist to, in recent years, to reckon with the fact that these algorithms are already being used for and increasingly going to be used for making stuff in our world.

Rainey-Smith: Well, it’s infuriating in that these tools have been built off of the work of a whole lot of people who did not consent for their work to be used in this way.

Miller: Basically, all human creation ever can be fed into these machines. They can then spit out some version of formerly human work.

Rainey-Smith: And it’s been deeply frustrating to see the CEOs of these companies talk about and act like there’s no way to differentiate between copywritten work and non-copywritten work. And I’m a woodcut printmaker, and I learned years ago how to mark all of my image files with metadata, marking them as copyrighted with my contact info. But it’s also frustrating because I know that people are going to be doing things like generating images instead of actually picking up a pencil or other tool, and there is so much beauty in creating things.

Miller: Liv, congratulations again and thanks very much.

Rainey-Smith: Thank you.

Miller: Liv Rainey-Smith is a Portland-based, award-winning woodcut printmaker.

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