Consider the tree upside down / Roots to the sky / Trunk to the ground
Man before a mirror
Saint Paul, Minnesota & Stockholm, Wisconsin: 2022. Edition limited to 13 copies, only 10 of which are for sale*. This composite and multi-faceted artwork, printed in blue, red, yellow, and black, consists of three scrolls, the first (approx. 18 inches by 8 feet) consisting of Schanilec's poem, "Man Before a Mirror," with extracts from Pablo Picasso, Wilder Bentley, Alice B. Tolkas, and Emerson Wulling, with other elements, and printed on Toro Gampi. The second and third scrolls (approx. 6 feet by 38 inches) are a pair of reduction-cut specimen prints printed on Gampi, printed directly from the eastern red cedar pulled from the ground during COVID, in the spring of 2020. "I pulled a dead cedar tree from the earth. It leaned against a post for a year or so. Consider the tree turned upside down, roots to the sky, trunk to the ground. It was about my height, about my weight, and the more I thought about it, the more it became ... me. "I sliced the cedar tree in two. I received a printmaking fellowship, giving me access to a large etching press, and printed the cedar tree. When I did there was no 28-gram Gampi paper available, so I went with 20-gram Gampi. Registration of two colors on a single sheet was clearly impossible. It was like printing on clouds. The two colors were printed on separate sheets: one layer, the color of skin, and behind it a second layer, the color of blood. Because of the translucency of the paper, the image read equally well from front and back, so the reflection was simply the print viewed from the other side of the two sheets. '"Man Before a Mirror was printed in an edition of 13. It became clear that without a text, the edition would be exiled to a cardboard box. So I printed a textual scroll to go along with the image. Besides my own writing I indulged, as I often do, in appropriated text: "'From this evening, I am giving up painting, sculpture, engraving, and poetry so as to consecrate myself entirely to singing'. Pablo Picasso to Paul Sabartes, April 26, 1936. "'The trouble with Picasso was that he allowed himself to be flattered into believing he was a poet too'. Alice B. Tolkas, 1949. "'You will never be T. S. Eliot'. Robert Rulon-Miller to Gaylord Schanilec, 2022" (from Schanilec's talk at the Grolier Club, November 4, 2002)." All three scrolls contained in a hand-made wooden casket by Schanilec, with sides of black walnut, a hinged lid of white oak, and hard maple handles; the finials are of Eastern red cedar and the dowels of hard maple. All the wood comes from Schanilec's Woods in Stockholm. Casket measurements are 56 inches in length (plus 3" for each of the handles), by 5 inches. The hardware for the casket comes from Casket Builders' Supply in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. *The entire edition is sold exclusively by Rulon-Miller Books. Item #61544
Price: $18,000.00
