• titled: titled lower left in margin, in pencil
• signed: lower right in margin, in pencil; numbered lower left in margin, in pencil; printer's chop lower right corner; artist's copyright lower right corner
• medium: serigraph with 4 colors and 1 blend; printed by Robert Dressen, Jeff Wasserman and Kevin Griffen at Wasserman Silkscreen, Santa Monica, California
• dimensions: image size: 15 x 42" (38.1 x 106.7 cm); sheet size: 19 x 46" (48.3 x 116.8 cm)
• edition: 150 prints, 5 archive proofs, 18 artist's proofs, 15 hors de commerce, 4 printer's proofs; all on Stonehenge paper
• date published: 1981

Personal Reflections, by Arthur Secunda

Red Sky, Black Mountain is a long, narrow, horizontal silkscreen composed of land masses, shrouded in hidden fragments that resemble half-filled burlap sacks. These three mountaintops harken back to Goya figures shrouded with capes, hiding their faces, and hidden from the viewer's frontal presence. They are therefore hidden from the viewer's perception as total entities. These three mountain shapes - black, green, pinky-rose forms - are comparable to tips of icebergs in the sense that what is seen is only an abstract hint of what may be hidden.

The mountain shapes against a brilliant cadmium red sky only begin to tell the story. The sun image is a floating cloud. It has the shape of a sun but the sonority of a cloud. The red sky defies reality. It reminds me of the sky in Arles, which is also red. Red and black have a special symbolic vibration, not at all optical, but sonorous and rhythmic. Red and black - the blood, the night; the fire, the mystery; the solid, the void; the human, the eternal; red and black become intense neighbors.

Using five basic forms, this landscape has been transposed into more than the landscape. Its matter is outer spatial, surreal, unpopulated - an other-worldly coming together of forms which depend upon one another, as they huddle toward each other and seek companionship. The negative shape of the black mountain points toward the middle, while the negative shape of the rose-colored mountain (hovering behind the green) cowers in an implicit needing of closeness. There is a slowness in their existence and a weightiness of movement. The floating cloud (or sun) gazes benignly, the only moving entity in the scene.

There is a rich serenity of tactile, nuanced forms in this picture, which lock together in a very essential way, so that the totality speaks in one voice about secretness, mystery, intensity, and internally dependent forms. The colors and the timelessness of the subject/content here perhaps refer to an eternal transcendence, or at least to a complex spectrum of feelings, which is playful as well as spiritual.