Snapshot In Time: Approximately 400 years before Carol Summers created the woodblock print ALTIPLANO (one of several extraordinary modern western art prints over his career), Spanish explorers were pushing into the high plains (alitplano), or great plains as they are called now, of North America. In 1977, as Carol Summers inked his woodblock for ALTIPLANO, the Center for Great Plains Studies opened. Llewellyn L. Manske, a range scientist there, commented on our country's own altiplano: "There is a romantic image of the Great Plains as a vast, ageless, and pristine grassland in excellent health, with large herds of free-roaming bison accompanied by elk, antelope, wolves and grizzly bears in idealistic harmony. The present rangeland plants and wildlife have existed for only about 5,000 years and humans have lived on America's high plains for less than half that time." Indeed, if ever there was a place to view one of the country's most recognized landscapes today, it would be a sunset or sundown on the virtually unchanged high plains of America.

Art Smart Fact: Carol Summers produces his woodblock prints by hand, usually from a block or blocks of quarter-inch pine plywood, using oil-based printing inks and porous papers such as the ones used for Japanese woodblock prints. Summers is technically very proficient; the inks are thoroughly saturated onto the surface of the paper but they do not run into each other. The precision of the color inking in his artworks such as ALTIPLANO has been frequently referenced in a number of printmaking textbooks. Summers refers to his own woodblock printing technique as “rubbing”. In traditional woodcut printing the ink is applied directly onto the block whereas Summers applies it to the paper which lies on top the block or blocks. By following his own method, Summers has avoided the mirror-reversed image of conventional prints and it has given him the control over the precise amount of ink that he wants on the paper. This woodblock printing process was invented by Carol Summers and today is taught in fine arts academies and universities throughout the world as the "Summers Woodcut Printmaking Technique."

About The Art: Carol Summers has been called a modernist printmaker with a preference for color-field painting. Coming after the abstract expressionism of the 1950s, color-field painting represented a sharp change from this earlier movement. The production of the abstract expressionists involved a strong personal emotionalism, a painterly quality and occasionally elements of cubism. Most color-field artists moved toward a more impersonal and cold aesthetic. In their works they dealt with pure color; flat, two-dimensional space and monumental scale. Summers however, broke from the 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! His western art print ALTIPLANO represents the quintessential American landscape. In its simple yet dramatic form it is easy for the viewer to get down to basics.....land, water and sky.

Note: With the purchase from Peggity's of any of the original Carol Summers woodcuts you will receive free a four-color, 48-page Catalog Raisonne; and 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 at Peggity’s.