Linocut: Together (my grandparents in 1945)

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Together 5×4 Linocut painted with watercolor

Available in my Etsy Shop.  
My grandparents met and fell in love in a Connecticut textile mill as teenagers. They were married just shy of 75 years, and they still held hands, patted the empty seat next to them to beckon the other to come sit close, and they made each other laugh. I used to love to visit them, with my lap top, typing everything they said when I asked questions like Where were you when you first kissed? (In the back of a horse-drawn sleigh on a snowy Thanksgiving night in 1934) and What was your first date like? (Shared crackers and pickles during a lunch break on the loading dock of the mill) and Tell me about the first home you had as newlyweds? (A single room jutting from the roof of a building near the train tracks that they referred to as their little Penthouse). This linocut was inspired by a photo taken on a beach in 1945 when my grandfather was in the National Guard.

This proof was painted slightly different than the one above.
At a friend’s house for tea and art-making. Together, in process.


The block carved and ready to proof-print

The linocut before adding watercolor

Art Quote
Lee Krasner was a student of Hans Hofmann’s before she married Jackson Pollock. Trying one day to compliment her work, Hofmann did not please her when he said, as Degas said to Mary Cassatt, “This is so good you would not know it was done by a woman.”
Lee invited Hoffman to see Jackson’s work.
He spent a few minutes studying the un-stretched paintings tacked on the walls, then offered a compliment for which Pollock would never forgive him. “You are very talented,” Hofmann told him. “You should join my class.”
Hofmann went on to question Pollock’s methods. The teacher was surprised by the bareness of the room. There were no antique casts, no tabletops set with bowls of fruit, no still-life arrangements from which the artist could abstract. Hofmann, who believed nature was the source of inspiration of all art, wondered whether Pollock felt the same. “Do you work from nature?” he said.  Pollock, in his most famous display of bravado, blurted, “I am nature.”

Jackson Pollock: a Biography  ~Deborah Solomon

Thanks for stopping by!
Belinda

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