it was green there

…the world is round
and you could go on it
around and around

-Gertrude Stein, The World is Round

Hortus Conclusus

2009-13
Varied series of prints and drawings
Color intaglio prints
 
18 x 18 inches
Mixed material, silver-point & beeswax drawings on panels
15 x 15 inches

In, The Enclosed Garden: History and Development of the Hortus Conclusus and its Reintroduction into the Present-day Urban Landscape, authors Rob Aben and Saskia de Wit describe Hortus Conclusus as a coming together of two worlds: an ‘unworldy’ ideal and that of the real landscape. “The garden gathers the landscape around itself and at the same time shuts itself off from it. It is both inside and outside simultaneously, both endless and finite.”

Aben and de Wit go on to discuss the polarity between the boundless expanse of the sea with its oceanic sense of space that one feels at the shore, and the sensation of walking on the sand with the palpability of the grains and awareness of finite place, time and moment. “In the enclosed garden this polarity emerges as its most distinctive quality:
the paradox of the infinite in the finite, two extremes heightened by being present simultaneously.”

A second, a pearl (1 & 2)

2013, 
Color intaglio
2 companion prints
20 x 18 inches

–My past is a stupid butterfly’s overseas voyage.
My future is a garden
where a cook cuts the throat of a rooster.

What do I have, with all my pain and rebellion?
–Take a moment, just one, and when its fine shell,
Two joined palms, slowly opens
What do you see?
        –A pearl, a second…
 — Czeslaw Milosz, from A Frivolous Conversation,

Subtle Anatomy (1 & 2)

2011
Color intaglio and Letterpress
2 companion prints 
Printed in collaboration with Grafikwerkstatt Dresden
15 x 20 inches
text from Emily Dickinson

 

Russian novelist and lepidopterist, Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), theorized about particular blue butterflies of the genus Polyommatus, believing they came from Asia to the Americas in five ‘waves’ of migration over millions of years.  Only in early 2011 was his previously dismissed theory validated.
I read about it in the New York Times.

Nabokov developed his theory by identifying species of male blue butterflies according to their genitalia, and was credited by current researchers with having done quite a good job at distinguishing species seemingly not different by using this traditional method
of examination. 

The World is Round...

2009/10
Color intaglio, letterpress
suite of 15, with 3 prints completed 2023
8.5 x 12 inches
Printed in collaboration with Grafikwerkstatt, Dresden
Text from Gertrude Stein

… a book for children by Gertrude Stein, The World is Round, tells the story of nine-year-old Rose who goes on a journey in search of herself and struggles to establish a stable identity in a round world of variability. The complex and labyrinthine qualities of the tale mirror her efforts, resulting eventually in a story, but in the process, move it in circularity and fold it back upon itself.