Alignment (6 AM) - Limited Edition 10 of 10 Print

This one is kind of sad to me because it reminds me of my late studio dog Tizzy. He was sick, and I was standing at the dining room window, which overlooks the dog pen, waiting for him to come back in, when I noticed this bright red star or planet up in the west. Then, as my eyes grew more accustomed to the dark, I saw another star off to the left, higher up, and down below, across the street, was a neighbor's yard light. Tracing these three lights on window with my finger formed a parabola, a curve that often turns up in my work. I looked at my watch and it was 6 o'clock, DST, so it was actually 5 o'clock, just at the edge of dawn. And only then did I see the tree! - this sweet gum towering over me! - which will someday fall on the house if we don't do something about it. This an example of what I usually mean by an ambush—something I've seen a thousand times before but never as a painting until that moment. So I checked my sky map and sure enough, it was Mars—so bright because this was within a week one of its closest approaches to Earth—and the other star was Aldeberan in Taurus. And besides all that, this was the morning of April 8, 2014, when Mars, Earth and the Sun were in perfect alignment, so that as Mars set, the sun would rise. So it all came together. All I had to do was add the crow in the tree to fill out the parabola. So I did I did a watercolor and then this print. But for the print I had to deviate a little from my usual linocut technique. The background trees weren't printing out dark enough, so I did some selective wiping, and also added some yellow à la poupée with a small brayer to simulate the light from the window. If you'd like to see a video of me making this print, here it is: https://vimeo.com/96426679. So this is part 3-color linocut, part monotype, image 10 x 7 inches, sheet 11 x 9 inches. The Criswell Linocut I began these experiments with linoleum back in 1999. Although these prints may resemble etchings, drypoints, lithographs or some strange hybrid, they are true relief prints, printed in two or more colors from linoleum blocks. I didn't invent this technique - Picasso and his printer Arnera did - but I've adapted it to my own purposes and, since nobody else in the world is doing it as far as I know, I'm calling it "The Criswell Linocut." The two most important things about this technique are that (1) I cut the designs with a drypoint needle and (2) that I print the dark color first and the light color second. This enables me to draw my image directly on the key block, just as I would draw with a pen on paper, rather than cut away everything BUT the image as in traditional relief printmaking. For more info about this, checkout .html.