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The Culvert, 2018, linocut, image 5 x 7, sheet 8 x 10 inches I heard from my friend the printmaker Evan
Lindquist that his son Carl hsd fallen ill in India, where he
teaches at a university in Bangalore, now in a hospital bed with
steroid IVs dripping into his veins - and writing poetry! So
I go to his Facebook page and the first thing I see is this poem: A WINDING ARC TOWARD NOON Down by the river He laughs, These days I expect nothing. But during some mornings as it winds its way toward noon. (Carl Lindquist, 2018) I had been in a slump, inspired by nothing,
but this poem knocked me out. I had been there, down by that
river, and whenever I got desperate enough I would paint an image
of that despair, and that would kick me out of it. I felt like
this was what Carl was trying to do, at the same time seeing
the joke on himself. Buddha said to be born was suffering, living
was suffering, dying was suffering. Shoot the son of a bitch.
But he just laughs in your face. Ha. I was strangely inspired
by that poem, but then I realized that I had already painted
it, The Culvert, in 2007! This is the final frame in my animation,
The Crow. I had the river, the unexpected sunrise, the red wound
of dawn, the gun, the bullet and the arc toward noon. True, instead
of the Buddha I had the crow, but the crow is Death, and you
can no more kill Death than you can kill the Buddha, so to me
the painting and the poem had the same meaning. I hadn't made
a print of that image, so I decided to try it then. The linocut
of The Culvert is the result. A linocut is a relief print like
a woodcut, with the image cut from one or more pieces of smooth
linoleum instead of wood blocks. But I use a radically unconventional
method invented by Picasso and his printer, Arnera, which I have
adapted to my own needs. They are true relief prints, though
they may not look like it, and since I'm the only one in the
world doing this, as far as I know, I'm calling it The Criswell
Linocut. All of the technical details can be found at my website
[here]. See this print on Saatchi Art for more info.
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