Excavation: Ink Sculptures, Relics, and Artifacts

Excavation: Ink Sculptures, Relics, and Artifacts

by Alan Grabelsky

In 2016, after a lot of experimentation, I developed an approach to printmaking that I described in the catalog for my 2021 show, Love Songs: A Journal of Fateful Encounters. I wrote, “...each print is inspired by a particular encounter that happened at a particular moment when I was paying proper attention.”  That is, they sprang from some specific inciting incident that I was first able to capture in an ink drawing. The drawing was then used as the foundation for the elements married together in the final multi-layered print.  I continued to work that way until 2023, when my process took an unexpected turn while I was recovering, painfully, from back surgery.

For a while I couldn’t work at all and when I did get back into the studio, instead of building the final layered print from an ink drawing and a gray cloud bed on a silver background, these new images appeared on the page almost fully formed. It seemed more like they were being revealed, rather than made as the result of a deliberate creative act.

The earliest pieces that emerged this way were the Ink Sculptures. The eight prints in this show are part of a larger group of images that just kept coming one after another without any conscious intention.  When my always insightful wife, Irene, got her first look at these prints, she said, “oh boy, this must be how your body feels.”  It struck me as a very valid observation. Rather than working from external experience, they were an expression of some inner vulnerability.

Where the inspiration for the Ink Sculptures could be explained by my own internal physicality, the Ceremonial Masks were much more of a surprise.  The six in this show appeared as if treasures, long buried and decomposing. They were now being carefully rediscovered, as one might unearth objects in an archaeological dig. Their origins are still deliciously mysterious to me, and they are the most unselfconscious work I’ve done to date.

The triptych, On the Long Road Home, and the three centaur-like prints, Dream Weaver, Night Terror and Wind Warrior, were made in the same time frame as the Masks. Although they were made with some degree of intention, their origin remains elusive to me. Their execution was shrouded in the same sense of wonder and discovery as the Masks.

In terms of process, instead of a line drawing in dialogue with its gray cloud bed on a silver background, the drawing and the cloud bed have been synthesized into one layer that contains even more complexity than the two separate layers ever did. The silver background remains, still framing the image and doing its own endless dance with the light.