- titled: lower left in margin, in pencil
- signed: full name in lower right in margin, in pencil;
numbered lower left in margin, in pencil; printer's chop (Jack
Lemon) lower left: Landfall wetstamp lower left on verso
- medium: two-color lithograph; printed by Ron Wyffels at
Landfall Press, Chicago, Illinois
- dimensions: image size: 25 5/8 x 36" (65.1 x 91.4 cm);
sheet size: 30 x 40" (76.2 x 101.6 cm)
- edition: 50 prints, 1 bon a tirer, 1 cancellation proof,
2 Landfall Press impressions, 2 printer's proofs (I & II), 6 trial
proofs; all on white Arches Cover paper
- date published: 1974
Personal Reflections, by Arthur Secunda
One of my favorite venues for making lithographs has always been
Landfall Press in Chicago. I believe I was either the first or
almost the first artist to work at the Press with then
master-printer Jack Lemon, who was the artists' dream lithographic
printer par excellence. Jack didn't have the flair of a Ken Tyler
or the elan of a Serge Lozingot, but he was always discreetly there
when needed and absent when not. The old shop on Ontario Street was
in his image, that is to say, totally functional and human, clean
but not antiseptic, and usually pregnant with a mood of expectation
and readiness that is hard to describe otherwise. The artists
workplaces were small and comfortable but adequate. The spot I
always liked best was near a window facing Ontario Street. For the
longest time I wanted to go to the Press without a priori ideas,
and just enjoy expressing something about that street. When the
opportunity finally presented itself the result was After The
Storm.
One day I just set out with a large stone to draw with a litho
crayon (not paint as was my usual way), to render what I saw
transpiring on the street a few feet away from me through the
dirty, rain-dripping, turn-of-the-century window on my left. Many
years later I was to use the same technique with a "router" from
the terrace of my Paris studio to create an engraved wood painting
titled, Traffic on Boulevard Brune. This linear contouring
and quasi-calligraphic shaping of curly figures and objects in
actual movement was for me a joyful testament to the moment of my
being alive and totally in that environment. It was my innocent way
of saying by getting lost in it that I was indeed a part of the
animation and spirit of everything that was going on.
By the time my drawing was finished, the storm clouds subsided
and the sun shone heavily through the blotted clouds in what seemed
a blanket of deep cadmium yellow evanescence. When the decision to
print with a second stone was made, the esthetics dictated an
out-of-context yellow so that the pervasive feeling could contain
an element of before and after: the drawing being the before and
the color representing the after. I recall seeing numerous versions
on the theme of After The Storm used in paintings and
watercolors from Rembrandt to Turner to Hiroshige. It seems to me
that the appeal of this subject stems from the idea implied in
transient time. In other words, implicit in showing an after, is
the fact of a before - thereby representing the relation between
the two propositions or images, not to mention that blurred dimly
remembered in-between automatically registered by the
subconscious.
But most of all I want After The Storm to be seen as a
simple peaen to a given moment, in which my senses were honed by
the aliveness and spirit of a particular place and time.
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