Drithelm was just your average Northumbrian guy, until he died and came back to life. Thereafter, he split his earthly goods into three lots, one for his family, one for his children, and one for the poor, and became a monk. He shared his vision of the afterlife –its rewards and its punishments– only to those he thought would heed its message.

He spent most of his time in prayer and mortification, often combining the two by praying in the frozen river nearby. To quote the Venerable Bede:

And as that place lay on the bank of the river, he was wont often to go into the same to do penance in his body, and many times to dip quite under the water, and to continue saying psalms or prayers in the same as long as he could endure it, standing still sometimes up to the middle… And when in the winter the half-broken pieces of ice were swimming about him, which he had himself broken, to make room to stand or dip himself in the river, those who beheld it would say, “It is wonderful, brother Drithelm, (for so he was called,) that you are able to endure such violent cold;” he simply answered, for he was a man of much simplicity and indifferent wit, “I have seen greater cold.” And when they said, “It is strange that you will endure such austerity;” he replied, “I have seen more austerity.”

Here’s another print from the etching class I took this spring at Cabrillo College. It’s called Icarus Over the Boardwalk.

Icarus was the son of Daedalus, a gifted Athenian craftsman and inventor of the labyrinth used to imprison the Minotaur. Daedalus himself was imprisoned on Crete by King Minos after Daedalus gave Ariadne a clew (ball of thread) which she in turn gave to Theseus, who then defeated the Minotaur. Ever the visionary and inventor, Daedalus fashioned wings from wax and feathers, with which he planned to fly, with Icarus, from Crete to freedom.

The one catch was that the wings were held together with wax; fly too close to the sun, and the wax would melt, and whoever so erred would plummet into the sea. Daedalus took care to warn his son.

Icarus, thrilled with the freedom and joy of flight, forgot all about his father’s warning, and soared up close into the sun’s rays. The heat melted the wax, the feathers loosened, and Icarus, as warned, fell to his death.

On some nights, if the wind is right, I can hear the trundle of rollercoaster wheels and screams of terror and delight from the Santa Cruz boardwalk. It’s a fantasy world in its own right, and in the evening, when its carnival lights come on, attracts lost souls of all sorts to its orbit. Why not Icarus?

This print is an etching with aquatint. It was actually a test plate, with each of the rays coming from Icarus etched for a different length of time. This version was burnished to soften the edges between the timed rays, and has a second color selectively applied.

The myth of Icarus has been a popular theme for artists for ages. Here is Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (ca. 1558) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Icarus is on the lower right, his legs splashing in the water, evoking the Flemish proverb: ‘No plough stops because a man dies.’

The very different Daedalus and Icarus (ca. 1869) by Frederick, Lord Leighton.

And the very excellent print, Icarus by Hendrik Goltzius.

I was not familiar with this print, but my Icarus seems to be a combination of this one and the small figure of Daedalus flying in the background.

And Icarus appears in the virtual world of Second Life, here in the Second Louvre.

In fact, there’s an entire website dedicated to images of Icarus in art.

And of course, there’s always Iron Maiden.

*****
You can see Icarus Over the Boardwalk, and a whole lot of other prints and paintings, at my current solo show at Creative Framing & Gallery in Oakland.
The reception is at the end of the show, Saturday, August 28, 6:00 – 8:00pm. Please join us if you can!

This past spring I took a most excellent etching and aquatint class at Cabrillo College. Now I’m finally getting around to scanning and framing some of the work I did. Here’s the first scan:

This is “Bob”, with our feline friend Bob posing on his favorite perch in the back yard. It is an etching with chine collé, a process where a decorative paper is embossed into the base paper during the printing process.

I learned a lot during the class, both technical information and new ways of looking at printmaking. I jumped into making prints feet first after returning from the Camino de Santiago, picking up some linoleum and cutting tools and just going at it, trial and error. I learned a lot that way too, and have fallen in love with the whole idea of multiples. The main difference I have found between my way of printing block prints (inking with a brayer and using a small press) and making etchings and aquatints is the freedom and innovation of playing on the press itself. That is, once the print has been etched, there is SO MUCH you can do to it after that. You can just do a basic print, or wipe the ink creatively, or apply the ink to specific areas, or do chine collé, or, or, or… it seems like an infinite realm of possibilities. (And yes, I’m planning on applying some of these ideas to block prints, too.)

This is one of the prints I’ll be showing at Creative Framing and Gallery in Oakland during the month of August. I’ll be hanging the show on Monday, and the reception will be at the end of its run, on August 28. Come by and visit!

By the way, here’s Bob in real life.

He’s a handsome fellow, isn’t he?