Snapshot In Time: Carol Summers has rendered several volcanoes over his 55 year plus career, one of the most popular elements in Latino or Hispanic folk art. An active volcano is a mountain where magma (rock of the earth's interior made molten or liquid by high pressure and temperature) erupts through the surface of the planet. The study of volcanoes is called vulcanology (or volcanology in some spellings). According to the Smithsonian's Global Volcanism Program, approximately 43 volcanoes throughout the world were in various stages of eruption when Carol Summers began creating this particular woodcut. Luckily none were near the artist's studio!

Art Smart Fact: LOS VOLCANES DE DIA Y NOCHE is a superb example of Symmetrical Balance....achieved when opposite sides of a work of art are balanced by matching elements. Artists use symmetrical balance to create feelings of stability and permanence; it is often used in the portrayal of large geological subjects such as mountains and valleys, or in architectural and religious works of art. In this colorful woodblock print it is not just the volcanoes that are symmetrically balanced but the land and sky and day and night! Symmetrical balance also characterizes both older and modern folk art.

About The Art: The name of this woodcut art translates, as you might easily guess into DAY AND NIGHT VOLCANOS. It was completed after a one of Summers' frequent journeys through Mexico where he has a second studio. Carol Summers continues to be referred to as a modernist printmaker with a preference for color-field painting. This came about over 50 years ago when his woodblock prints were first exhibited at the Modern Museum of Art in New York City. Evolving after the abstract expressionism of the 1950s, color-field painting represented a sharp change from the preceding art style. The artwork of the abstract expressionists involved a strong personal emotionalism, a painterly quality and occasionally elements of cubism. However, most color-field artists moved toward a more impersonal and cold aesthetic. In their art they favored pure, unmodulated areas of color; flat, two-dimensional space; monumental scale and often varied the shape of the paper itself.

Early on however, Summers partially broke from this pack.....his modernist style and artwork is almost always rooted in the landscape and his extreme simplification and flat color areas are anything but hard-edged or coldly impersonal. LOS VOLCANES DE DIA Y NOCHE is quintessential modernist Summers, that is, a semi-abstract landscape emotionally charged with wonder and joy at the sheer beauty and power of nature. At only 40 woodcuts, LOS VOLCANES DE DIA Y NOCHE is one of Summers' smallest editions in over 50 years.

Note: With the purchase of any of the Carol Summers woodcuts at Peggity's you receive free a four-color, 48-page Catalog Raisonne; a four color, 64-page 50-Year Retrospective Exhibition Catalog (including a color woodcut frontispiece); and the museum poster ROLLING SEA.....all personally signed by Carol Summers. Each of these items can also be acquired separately here at Peggitys.com.