etching and aquatint with hand-colored chine collé

23.25 x 17.75 inches (image)

29.5 x 22.25 inches (sheet)

from sets of an edition of 30 unique impressions

2023

My usual studio space has several parts: paintings on the walls, drawings and prints on tables in the middle, paints and inks and dry media and other tools in-between, and books and writings on the fringes. The different parts in my studio help to keep me moving, like stations along a road. Things are in flux, swinging in and out of abstraction. I feel curious and glad in the spaces that open up in that imagined landscape, glad to follow, to find. At the center of it all — not in the center visibly, but rather central to the daily work — lie my drawings. Sometimes drawings are a way of story-making. Sometimes they remain figurative enough to be recognized as something known or remembered. Sometimes they become a form of recording.

In the printmaking studio the open ways of drawing merge for me with the linear processes of printing. Three of the etchings are of wooden figures that I found while helping to clear an old attic space. The birds, the hinged dog, and the horse emerged from the half-dark with their shapes and characters intact. The fourth etching is of my dog, who belongs with the others, bridging their world of open play with ours. Among the layers of inspiration for this project are also the life stories of toy creator Margarete Steiff and pediatrician Janusz Korczak. The notions of how to be and how to invent — of how to be in one’s inventions, and how to survive through them — are all tied into this series.

• Anna Schuleit Haber, September 2023

Set 1