Canyon Wall from the collection of South Carolina Arts Commission

Canyon Wall, 1969

etching and aquatint

26.5 x 23.5 in

Signature: titled on lower left; inscribed a/p on lower center; signed and dated on lower right

The Canyon Wall was conceived as an homage to the Southwestern United States. Somewhere during the evolution of its concept it changed into a commentary on the transience of mortality. The source was the Blanco River Canyon in Central Texas. Through the years the river had cut through many layers of rock and sediment. At the same time, the people and creatures that had passed through the canyon, or had come and stayed, had left their own marks, each unique and symbolically significant. The goats, once domesticated but escaped and once again wild, moving in single file along the sheer precipice with the ease of shadows and the regality of monarchs, suggested the ceremonial procession of deified animals along the frieze of an ancient Roman temple. The imagery, then, unfolds from top to bottom like the unmistakable symbolism of the human skull to which a mud dauber wasp had irreverently claimed squatter’s rights as a fitting place to build its nest and hatch its young. The prevailing mood of the piece is an echo of the poet Shelley’s “Ozymandias”.

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From South Carolina Arts Commission

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