PORTLAND — Kyle Bryant, a young print maker, had recently returned from a month-long residency at a Providence, R.I., arts center, and his studio was in need of organization. Watching him pace between stacks of prints and piles of lumber searching for misplaced tools, the source of the restless energy that characterizes his art became apparent.

“I’m never satisfied,” he said. “I could make 300 prints in a month and wonder why I didn’t make 350.”

“I don’t have a sense of accomplishment, because the moment I’m satisfied is the moment I’m stagnant,” he said. “I just have a hunger to do big things.”

Increasingly, Bryant, a graduate of Edward Little High School in Auburn and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, has been doing big things, putting together solo shows in Portland and selling a wall-sized print to the Portland Museum of Art this summer. He’s starting a subscription print program, offering a print a month for the next year to art enthusiasts who sign on. And he was recently awarded a grant to produce a rap album with a corresponding series of narrative wood block prints.

His art tends to pair chaotic urban scenes of buildings straining to move beyond their allotted space with people and animals seeking to unburden themselves. It is influenced in part by his childhood in the Twin Cities, he said.

“My work has always had that industrial decay feeling to it,” Bryant said. “That can only be attributed to growing up in Lewiston-Auburn.”

His introduction to art was exploring the cities and discovering local graffiti writers in and around the former mill buildings, he said.

He has tried to replicate the availability of street art in his own career, he said, and in an era of computers and convenience chooses to make art by hand. For Bryant, the process of creation involves carving images into sheets of wood, sometimes taller than he is, then rolling them with ink and pressing the design to paper for the final product.

The physicality of printmaking is important, he said. “I can make the same file on a computer. And I can print it,” he said. “But that doesn’t come across the same way as spending countless hours with an archaic tool to create something real.”

And like the graffiti that opened his eyes to art, Bryant wants his work to be accessible. “We have this idea in our society that you need to have a nice house before you can have art,” he said. “I want to create work in edition, so that people who appreciate it can own it.”