Editions

Nancy Friese, River Aven (2000), a woodcut with chine colle in an edition of 20 plus five artist's proofs and two printer's proofs. It measures 23x83 in. (paper) and 15x75 in. (image) and was printed from three blocks on Seikosen natural paper colleed to Rives BFK paper by Maxine Richard at Mimosa Press in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Last summer Nancy Friese, who teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design, spent the summer in Pont-Aven in Brittany, where she had an artist's residency. Inspired by the town's most famous resident, Paul Gauguin, Friese created a very poetic landscape, conceived as a long horizontal printed with three blocks. Rocky, low- brush terrain in greenish-black dips down from either end of the 75-in. composition, opening a wedge of gray-blue sky and vermilion clouds. Or is it the river? Hard to say for sure, as the rough, staccato carving dissolves into symbolist-inflected abstraction. This is a very nice homage, indeed. Published by Mimosa Press.