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11" X 17" Mixed Media |
We
were heading west that cool morning in early spring, a little sad because we
were leaving Colorado.
At the
gateway of the wide-open spaces of the Res, ahead of us were miles and miles of
land dotted with the occasional trailer and dusty clouds of sheep.
The
town of Shiprock was behind us and the monolith from which the town took its
name--the monolith ruling that part of the world--sparkled in the day's rising moisture.
A muddy excuse for a road would have taken us to the base of Shiprock, but we elected
to continue on toward Teec Nos Pos and Canyon de Chelly.
A few
minutes later, I turned back and took in the long shadows of the ridge, Shiprock
beginning to fade to a ghost in the distance. Silently I said, farewell, knowing it might be a while
before I returned. The shadows on the ridge were deep indigo and the alluvial
slope at the base of spires was a lace skirt of greens woven from early spring
grasses.
This
is a mixed-media piece. I threw pretty much everything I had in the studio at
this one. It started out as a monoprint. I did a drawing on tissue, turned it
over, and recreated the image on the Plexiglas plate backwards, so the mirror
image of the print on paper was oriented the right way in the final piece. It
would have been sacrilegious to paint an icon like this backwards.
One of
the things I love most about creating monoprints is the texture added by the
transfer of the paint from the Plexiglas plate to the paper. You can still see
that texture in the sky and foreground, tiny blobs of paint here and there.
After
several transfers: a blue, a magenta, a yellow, then one more round of each
with variations, I cast aside the plate and used colored pencil to add detail
directly to the paper, the last glimmering strokes applied with a silver
pencil. The result—as brilliant and beautiful as I remembered.
Note
the new signature. The why for this choice will be a topic for the future.
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