Plants & insects

de Roberta Delaney

"In Spring Snow, Mishima was lamenting the change in Japan's love of nature as part of its cultural identity.... Upon re-reading it, I remembered the passages selected for Plants and Insects. The words under the prints are from these passages and act as titles. The book is my homage to the fine graphic arts of the Edo period. The covers are soft for this reason, the images large for the page, and the style of the wrap-around binding prevalent. I used every type of woodcutting technique available, including a power tool. Colored mica is still available and included on some images. Because each print is hand colored, they are not the same. To add to this playfulness, I took a graphite stick and rubbed the woodblock on the verso pages to produce a reversal of the print [on facing pages]. These rubbings are very close to drawings"--Artist's statement on signed sheet, laid in.