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Relief
46″h x 58.5″w
Unique 2001
Yizhak Elyashiv and I have printed together on three projects. I print for very few printers. I like to print with artists who come to the press without prejudice, who have no feel for “what a print should be”, who make art not prints. Yizhak is such an artist.
Yizhak’s eloquent science/language/system of marks seem so effortless that it is as though they fall onto the paper without our having been involved. He carefully plans every move prior to arriving in the pressroom. Perhaps it involves a segregation of and/or a mathematical organization of natural systems – flower petals organized according to size along a single line, a platted field, intersecting lines that graph the chance dropping of grains on a given area. It is all perfectly precise. But once in the press room, he gently gives these carefully arranged systems back to the arbitrary whims of nature – a dollop of ink too thick to escape under the press roller without making its own decisions about marks, an ink modifier carefully placed to reinvigorate a sleeping line, two hundred drilled holes in the plates that allow the paper to rise out of a sky of blue ink to form a constellation of surprising three dimensionality. Yizhak’s prints have scale. So when the constellation appears, it looms over you at nine feet. The grain-colored maps, graphed and marked, appear horizonless. Big images of big spaces, intimate glimpses of some sort of science, math or fact – all without answers to the unanswerable questions – moving facts and mysteries.
