The Magic Forest

 

Malcolm H. Myers

  1917 - 2002 (biography)

1961  

color etching, open bite, soft ground, color stencil, gold leaf 

23 11/16 x 25 13/16" platemark 

pencil, lower right 

10 of 15  

pencil titled, dated, and editioned 

"Malcolm H. Myers: Five Decades of Paintings and Prints" exhibition catalogue, University of Minnesota, 1996 (illustrated page 12) 

sturdy cream wove 

published 

artist 

24730 

$1,900.00 

By 1961 Malcolm Myers was an established professor of intaglio printmaking at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis. He had been immersed in the major printmaking environments of Abstract Expressionism in America and Europe for fifteen years, working as an assistant to Mauricio Lasansky at the University of Iowa from 1946 to '48, and then traveling on a Guggenheim Fellowship to work at Stanley William Hayter's famous workshop, Atelier 17, in Paris in 1950. In 1954, on another Guggenheim Fellowship, Myers traveled to Mexico City, where he worked with Diego Rivera and Rufino Tamayo. With every new venture, the drive of the printmaking giants he studied under and worked alongside inspired Myers to delve more deeply into his preferred medium, printmaking, to find his own form of expression.

"The Magic Forest" is emblematic of Myers' most singular decade of self-expression, one in which his evolving techniques and his love of ancient art and artifacts - such as the Lascaux Cave paintings and the Indigenous spiritual crafts of pre-Columbian Mexico - combined in an explosion of energy on the plate. The Magic Forest was created during Myers' period of fascination with the story of Don Quixote; this image may address the scene in which the titular character battles the Knight of the Forest.

Of note is the layered textures executed in both color and black and white: as the viewer looks upon the composition for a time, delicate, shadowy layers emerge from the background, appearing soft as oil pastel and offering balance to the heavily gouged linework that outlines the creatures, machines, and flora scattered across the matrix. The energy that emits from the two dimensional composition is typical of the work that came from Atelier 17, which encouraged atists to let go of precision and allow for the automatic mind to take over and see what would materialize.