Long Gone Linocuts, Tiny Heads Edition

Life is full of strange little coincidences. Here's one of them. Should you be itching to get your hands on a couple of linocuts I made in 2002, both of which feature portraits done at less than one square inch, and both of which have been long sold-out, you now have your chance. Well, two chances, actually, one in cyberspace and one the old-fashioned way.


This portrait of Andy Warhol is currently up for auction on eBay. Now, I have nothing to do with the sale, but I was pleased to see the little print again when the seller contacted me to ask a couple of questions about it. Here's a link to the auction. This print came at the tail end of a whole series of tiny linocut portraits, mostly of writers, but a few visual artists as well. It amused me to make a linocut print of Warhol that both echoed his format and had so very little in common with his style - hand-drawn instead of photographic, tiny instead of huge. . . and unapolegetically a print. It kind of irks me that so many references to Warhol's "paintings" are made that seem to completely ignore the printmaking aspect of his work. Anyway, here's that tiny print, and this is the only opportunity that I know of to get it. I certainly don't have any to sell you! (and no, I'm not getting anything from plugging this auction. . .)

Now, I will get paid if this one sells:


24 Poets and 1 Astronaut
Here's your only chance to buy this linocut, at least from me! This was one of my most popular images, and was a real challenge to cut. The print for sale is framed and was in several exhibitions, but I'm letting it go - it's for sale at the Art Loft, a Pittsburgh gallery in Mount Lebanon. I have several linocuts there at the moment, should you be in the area.

If you would like to see a few more of these portrait linocuts, you might want to check out the web-version of a solo show I had at Kent State University Stark Campus, Marc Snyder In Black and White. That little Ginsberg portrait was the first of the series. I have a real fondness for those tiny prints - I made them when I had just left my teaching position in Georgia to move to New Haven, CT. I had left a full printshop behind, and hadn't purchased my own press yet, so I was limited to working very small, printing with a spoon. Out of necessity, a whole body of work was born. After I purchased my etching press, the scale and complexity of the prints grew, but I still kept pursuing both relief prints and a type of imagery that I had started to explore when I had very few tools at hand. Things work out sometimes.