“There's something about the smell of the ink that really excites me,” R. Keith Rendall said recently in his Wiscasset gallery, Rendall Fine Art.

Rendall is a master printmaker who utilizes pen and ink, etchings, engravings, woodcuts and carvings to present and honor nature and her creatures. Whether great blue heron, cormorant, snapping turtle, whale, beaver, shells, or flora, their beauty is both honest and haunting. Each pen and ink piece, etching and engraving is hand printed by the artist.

He was completely drawn to printmaking and the Renaissance while in college in the mid to late 1970s. Today, when Rendall is hand printing one of his drawings or etchings, he is aware of those artists who used the same mediums centuries before.

“Every time I do a printing I'm kind of conscious of these artists that explored printmaking in the earlier eras. I try to add to that body of work, so to speak, by asking how I can make each piece different, or how can I experiment with the ink, the paper?”

Rendall loves the strong graphic of the woodcut, the image of which he has fully developed in his mind before he begins a piece. Most of the woodcuts are carved on birch or maple plywood, although he has used mahogany from time to time. The woodcuts are printed on high quality Japanese paper.

“I just start carving. For me, if it's too perfect a drawing, you end up with a piece without character that looks like an illustration. I try to be more free, more interpretive,” Rendall said. “Most of my pieces take a year to carve.”

With each piece, regardless of the medium chosen, Rendall has the representation of the “true creature” in mind. All images have personal stories and are done from direct observation or experience, with a meaning behind them.

“I try not to personify them,” Rendall said. “I want to give each one the respect, and the space, to represent them in a truthful manner. To be truthful about their existence.”

Rendall also uses his pieces to make a statement about the creature and how humans can learn something from them, with an ecological, political or social edge.

One day he discovered a deceased horseshoe crab. He knew that their numbers were decreasing because people were collecting them for the blood plasma, which is copper based.

“It's a primordial type of blood,” Rendall said. “The crabs were being drained of their blood. I wanted to record it. When I was a kid I used to see so many of them, now they are harder to find. Recently I learned that they are no longer drained and are released back into the wild.”

He made his own ink for the pen and ink 24 by 18-inch drawing out of beef bouillon and gum arabic. The result: a piece that looks as though it could have been made centuries ago, almost as long ago as the horseshoe crab has existed.

When working with woodcuts, he is thinking in terms of lines that create motion and drama.

The recently sold “The Tempest,” a 24 by 18-inch woodcut, was created from a dream. The bufflehead are riding the waves of a tempestuous sea, yet appear non-plussed. Rendall's use of light and dark creates confusion, for the viewer.

“Waves are crashing down, but the buffleheads aren't bothered by the turbulence. I think there's a lesson to be learned from the buffleheads,” Rendall said. “They seem to have a sense of what's about to happen, keeping themselves above the crest of the wave. They appear to have total confidence, responding to what's happening at the moment.”

In his series, “On Hard Ground,” Rendall conveys the beautiful yet harsh western part of the state. When he moved to Maine in 1982, he lived in Phillips. For 18 months he walked everywhere during the day, bringing a couple copper plates (hard ground etching) and needles to capture the scenery. His first piece, exhibited in the gallery, is of the honeysuckle tree in his yard.

“I love western Maine, it is very beautiful and the people are really nice, but it is a hard place to make a go of it financially,” Rendall said. “The landscape has taken its toll on them, there's a lot of poverty. The series, ‘Hard Ground’ has dual meanings. It refers to the technique and how the landscape and people impact one another.”

At any given time Rendall has 20 to 30 ideas in his mind for future projects. There are seven or eight “in process” right now, including his spring show tentatively entitled, “The Death of the Beehive.”

Rendall has been an artist for 35 years; 18 of those years are represented in his gallery at 65 Main Street in Wiscasset. The space, also his studio, is where he offers master printmaking classes in woodcuts, etching and monoprinting.

For more information on the classes or the gallery, call Rendall Fine Art at 207-350-9322.