Penthesilea (Love is a Dog Bite) - Limited Edition 11 of 12 Print

I was both appalled and inspired by Heinrich von Kleist's drama of ferocious love and the fragile membrane between love and hate, life and death. Kleist was a writer in the Germany of Beethoven and Goethe, and in his version of the Trojan War, Achilles is killed not by Paris but by his girlfriend Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons, and not by an arrow in the heel but by teeth to the throat - and other places. Achilles wanted to take her back to the Greek camp, but you don't take an Amazon back to your place, she takes you back to her place. So the affair ended badly. My alternate title, "Love is a Dog Bite," is lifted from the song "Shelf Life" by Carey Ott, from Lucid Dream. But how to paint it? I eventually solved the problem in the painting by pushing the gruesome climax back into the middle distance of a post-collapse I-30 landscape, but this print zeros in on the action. (I'm not sure how the flying hyena from my "Roadkill" painting slipped in....) You can watch a video showing the evolution of this image at .html , and you can see me talking about it in an interview at .html . This is a small print, done as a demonstration of my peculiar linocut technique in a workshop for a printmaking class at a local university. It's a 2-color linocut, image 3.5 x 4 inches, sheet7 x 6 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 is 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.