I had been blowing bubbles with sumi inks
and picking them up on mylar. The bubbles exploded like bombs. I had
no idea what I would do with them. By chance, a printmaker was
coming to the Rogue Gallery and Art Center for a workshop and one of
the students had dropped out. Director Judy Barnes was wondering
where she was going to find someone to fill in so the Art Center
would not have to pay the lost fees.
I’m a painter. I’d never done any
printmaking. On an irresistible impulse I said I would take the
workshop. Sometime before, I had found Painted Prints: The
Revelation of Color in Northern Renaissance and Baroque Engravings,
Etchings and Woodcuts, the catalog of an extensive show at the
Baltimore Museum of Arts. I had been intrigued with the fact that
Albrecht Durer and other printmakers used the matrix of a print to
make paintings.
During the workshop I discovered that a
print in its own right can be painterly simply by how the ink is
applied and wiped. It brought back to me Francisco Goya’s prints,
"Disasters of War," that I had once studied on a post grad art
history stint in Spain. The prints were Goya’s response to
Napoleon’s invasion in a crusade to bring The Age of Enlightenment
to Spain. Goya saw innocent people being slaughtered as the Spanish
"resistance" became as bestial as the French invaders.
200 years later our country has invaded
Iraq to bring Democracy to that country, something in all of it’s
long history it has never experienced. And the results are not
unlike the Napoleonic invasion of Spain.
As a result, I have made a suite of prints,
"Homage to Goya," which I have shown together and at regional print
shows. But what does that have to do with the sea? In cruising the
Web, I found out about the US Navy MK4 program. When warships go
into the Persian Gulf, they carry dolphins on board to send out for
sniffing out underwater mines in the sea just as trained dogs sniff
out explosives on land.
We have now learned how to use the animals
of the sea even to fighting our wars.