Thomas Morn: Interpretive
Prints
Thomas Moran (1837-1926)
went on the 1871 expedition to Yellowstone, his first of many trips west.
His drawings, watercolors, and paintings were instrumental in influencing
a reluctant Congress to make Yellowstone a national park. Art books of
the day, The Aldine, Picturesque America, Frank Lesslie's Illustrated
Magazine, turned his drawings and watercolors into woodcuts, introducing
a mostly East Coast America to the otherworldly landscape of the world's
first national park.
Looking at Moran's paintings,
it is clear that his style, often compared to the Hudson River School,
was big and dramatic. I took seventeen woodcuts, mostly around 9"
x 6", and enlarged them to 17" x 13". More than simply
enlarging them, I made as many as a dozen masks per image to selectively
enhance them, bringing out the drama so easily lost on the brittle, browing,
pages of books that are turning to dust. These books are disappearing
by the truckload as they are plated for their few steel engravings and
then thrown out as rubbish. Bigger and more dramatic, they are a tribute
to an age gone by (small catalogue: pdf).
The project took 350 hours.