With his virtuosic prints of rolling California hills, classically inspired nudes, and natural and manmade forms--from a seashell to his own printing press--Paul Landacre elevated wood engraving to a high art form in twentieth-century America. Landacre's ceaseless stylistic innovation placed his work in dialogue with California contemporaries like Edward Weston and Henrietta Shore; he was, in fact, central to an artistic milieu that has been described as a "small Renaissance, Southern California style." It is fitting, too, that the velvety blacks and dazzling whites of Landacre's prints can recall the images of the silver screen--for the artist's rustic bungalow on a Los Angeles hill was but a stone's throw from Hollywood, and his early patrons and supporters included such luminaries as the director Delmer Daves and the actress Kay Francis.