Robert Macfarlane, witch-doctor of the Fens, sage of the underlands, oracle of the old ways and seer of the ox-bow lakes has written another book. This latest tome, entitled 'Is A River Alive?' is a wide-roving meditation on the meaning of rivers. He asked if I would make a picture for the book's cover; and so I did. Inspired by the geological diagram-maps of the Mississippi river made by Harold Fisk in the 1940s, I started work on a large sheet of linoleum, armed only with a small chisel. I went into a sort of trance, and imagined that my chisel was the force of the river's flow, that I was water, tributary, estuary, delta. I carved the lino as water, flowing always downhill, always to the sea.
Eventually I had what I was after, and the next stage was twofold; I photographed the carved linoleum sheet to capture the cut, scraped and eroded surface, then inked and printed that same surface, photographing the resulting print. These two photographs were combined to produce the artwork for the image, which was then transformed into a screen print by methods too convoluted to trouble you with.
What matters are the results; and there are four of them; a left meander, and a right meander; an iron meander, and a mercury meander.
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Above, that's a close-up of the prints so that you can see the detail; below you can see the size of them in comparison with the forearms of actual human beings.
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The paper size here is 470mm x 720mm, whereas the actual print size is 410mm x 650mm. These are editions of 50, so there are 50 Mercury Right Meander, 50 Mercury Left Meander, and 50 of each of the Iron Meanders, left and right. The prints will all be numbered and signed by me, Stanley Donwood, even though they hadn't been when we got these photos taken...
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Robert's book, 'Is A River Alive?' is out on May 1st (today, if I get it together to send this email out) and you can snag a special signed edition AND support independent bookshops at this link.
And incidentally, we've made a beer with Abyss Brewery in Lewes to celebrate the publication of this watery volume. That's called Meander as well; maybe you'll find some of it somewhere.
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Anyway, do follow the link below if you're at all interested in what I've just been blathering on about. Salut!
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Nulla est magna scientia absque mixtura dementiae.
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