Last year, I decided to focus heavily on relief printmaking, primarily linocut. I’ve carved and carved and carved, and then took a class with Catherine Kernan through Zea Mays Printmaking Center. Everything I’d learned up to this moment prepared me to take great advantage of her innovative viscosity and plate-transfer inking processes.
Since then, I’ve been working on making these processes my own. Starting with a relatively small size of 12″x16″, I am now scaling up toward much larger impressions. I’m currently working 18″x18″, taking steps toward 22″x30″ and possibly larger.
She taught me to work on thin mulberry paper, which brings exquisite richness to the Akua inks, and a lightness that brings me closer to what’s in my mind’s eye.
And what’s there right now is trees — they are an eternal inspiration and model for me. This new way of working helps me visually describe the sense of being wrapped in Komorebi. That means “sunlight filtering through trees,” but not just as an atmospheric phenomenon: It is meant to describe the human response, the experience of being bathed (forest bathing is also a Japanese thing) in rays of sunlight while absorbing the quiet-smell-oxygen-loam-insects-birds-mycorrhizae-humidity and peace of the woods. No single word in English says it all, so I make my pictures.