36 Views of the Empire State Building, 1995
This series title is a take-off on "Thirty-Six Views of
Mount Fuji," a series of woodblock prints by Japanese artist,
Hokusai, completed in 1831 when he was 72 years old. His representations
of the metropolitan culture of the Edo suburb of Tokyo during
Shogun time are considered icons in the history of Japanese
landscape.
It also references the "36 views of the Eiffel Tower"
from Henri Rivière.
This series opens a window onto our New York landscape.
I first created the illustrations on stencil paper and Marcia
Newfield wrote the haikus for each one.
I printed directly from the paper stencil on an etching press
at Bob Blackburn's Printmaking Workshop in 1995.
Using a papercut plate, I printed one set in black
& white and a few sets in color (each with different colors).
While recording the numbers of prints per design, no more than
6 were made on the same design due to the fragility of the plates.
The plates where then bound in a one-of-a-kind book now in the
collection of Leo Koenders in Zurich.
A photocopied version of the book was made in an
edition of 200.