THICKETS / COMING TO LIFE AGAIN LIKE APRIL, 2021

This dual suite of wood cut prints are of deep forest, tangled and thriving. Anticipating Spring, the works pivot from frost-bitten brushwood to budding branches, reaching outward and upward, intertwining, and tangling. I think of these works as linked to the fable Sleeping Beauty. As the princess and her town slept, a thicket grew up around their kingdom. Deep and forbidding, it protected and hid them all from the world until it was time for the princess to be woken up- “coming into life again like April.”

​

Thicket printing plates are made from planed beach lumber harvested from a back county forest and were inspired and carved on sight, in the same thick, tangled, and overturned woodland, in frosted winter. They are printed on cold-press magnolia paper and pressed at Coastline College.

​

With a nod to the deceptively simple and spontaneous movements of sumi-e painting, the printing plates are the reality of bare form: the literal branches from the same woodland sight were collected in Spring. The pruned collection of budding green beach limbs was then pressed, cured, sanded, carved, and mounted for printing. Like April works are printed on Arches and Strathmore, and are hand pressed using a steel spoon. Each has a limited palette of black, white, silver, and pewter water-based inks used to create the value spectrum in the works.

​

All of these works are single-editions. Each work is created from one or several of the suite of two dozen print plates created for this project.