When the Levee Breaks - Limited Edition of 25 Print

The following, written upon the completion of the work, in 2014: This work, which I've decided to call When the Levee Breaks after the Led Zeppelin song is made entirely of ink with graphite only for the portrait on the left. The piece is a tribute to some of my favourite musicians of the 60s era. Appropriately, I have tried to give a rock poster kind of feeling to it, restricting myself to yellow, orange, white and black inks (except blue for the central picture on the right). Besides being an artist, I play the guitar too, picking it up after a long break in the second year of college. I was introduced to a list of the greatest rock guitar solos by a friend, and was instantly hooked- I might have heard Stairway to Heaven a thousand times since then. In the picture, I've shown a hard working man, yearning for meaning and having had enough from the world, imagining himself to be in a vast wheat field far away from the city and from any kind of distraction. The wheat field is a homage to Van Gogh who so perfectly captured the underlying religious temperament. The man looks up to the eternal philosopher, who like a beacon, floods the man's imaginary world with understanding. In this journey across the wheat field, music is his trusted companion who provides hope when things don't turn out as they should. The original not being on sale, high quality giclée prints are available on archival 310 GSM Hahnemühle paper, 1:1; printed using archival inks, these prints will last one a lifetime. Though, really, it does not make much sense in limiting the number of editions of a digital print, as I also indeed wish to control what aspects of quality I can (by way of supervising printing myself, and thereby being excluded from being able to sell open edition on Saatchi), I have decided to limit them to 25. As regards the costing rationale: having attempted selling my prints, previously, at their cost prices themselves, and having left the evaluation of my labour upon my customers to decide- and consequently, not having been able to make ends meet, I have decided, for the first time, to set a fixed profit for myself, in keeping with current practice. Wishing to remain entirely honest however, I must add that it costs me ₹475 per square foot to have the print printed, and ₹100 to have the original scanned, besides which packaging can be accounted for by adding another ₹1000. Entirely unable myself to set a price upon my work, I have chosen what I've seen on Saatchi itself being set for other similarly sized prints (choosing to remain still on the more reasonable side of things). It is for me, really, I must admit, an experiment, this.