Snapshot In Time: When Carol Summers was sizing the paper (hand-made rice mulberry also used in Japanese woodcut printing) for this woodblock print in 1998, there were other "farewells" being said. Earth said farewell to the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft, which brought us spectacular images of the "Red Planet", when it terminated transmission that year. No Senate tradition has been more steadfastly maintained than the annual reading of President George Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address and in 1998 it was no different.

Art Smart Fact: Did you notice there is not one straight line in this woodblock print. Summers used a mere five curved lines and four saturated colors to take the viewer to another place. The genius is in the reduction of a lot of detail to the essence of the landscape. FAREWELL is one of this artist's most powerfully compelling landscapes, a quintessential Summers image of the earth, water and sky at sundown in all their magnificent simplicity. It can be very hard for an artist, as it is frequently in real life, to get past the unessential and clutter to the basics. It may remind you of Napoleon who once wrote to Josephine, "If I had had more time, this letter would have been shorter."

About The Art: Despite it’s simplicity, FAREWELL is an exquisite example of Summers’ technical proficiency in woodblock printmaking; 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 woodblock prints that Summers achieves has been lauded in multiple printmaking text and handbooks. In the majority of his woodblock prints, Summers makes the blocks slightly larger than the paper so the image and color will bleed off the edge. Before printing, he centers a dry sheet of paper over the top of the cut wood block or blocks, securing it with giant clips. Then he rolls the ink directly on the front of the sheet of paper and pressing down onto the dry wood block or reassembled group of blocks.

Summers refers to his own woodcut printing technique as “rubbing”. In traditional woodcut printmaking, including the Japanese woodcut printing method, the ink is applied directly onto the block. However, by following his own method, Summers has avoided the mirror-reversed image of a conventional print and it has given him the control over the precise amount of ink that he lays on the paper. After the ink is applied to the front of the paper, Summers sprays it with mineral spirits, which act as a thinning agent. The absorptive fibers of the paper draw the thinned ink away from the surface softening the shapes and diffusing and muting the colors. This produces a unique glow that is a hallmark of the woodblock printmaking technique that Summers invented himself.

Unlike the works of other color field artists or modernists of the time, this new technique made Summers’ extreme simplification and flat color areas anything but hard-edged or coldly impersonal. By the time FAREWELL was completed, there was no doubt Carol Summers had developed a personal way of coloring and printing and that he was not afraid of hard work, doing the cutting, inking and pulling of much larger works.

Note: With the purchase of an original Carol Summers woodcut 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 Peggity’s.