From the Woods

Holly Downing

This image relates to a series of seven mezzotints that Holly Downing has done examining the structures of mushrooms, rending them in black and white in subtle tones that can best be accomplished in mezzotint. The individual images were printed in editions of 20. The series has also been published in a new artist's book "Fruiting Bodies (fungi)" and are accompanied with fungi-related poems by Forrest Gander, Jane Hirshfield, Anna Journey, Christine Boyda Kluge, Ted Kooster, W.S. Merwin, Gary Snyder, and Gary Young. Copies are available for purchase and can be ordered at: hollydowning@comcast.net

Chanterelles freshly gathered from the woods are displayed to show their elegant, irregular forms, their forked gills exposed beneath ruffled edges. The chanterelle mushroom is coveted as a culinary delicacy, but it is the process of locating the fungi that is part of its lore. Each variety of chanterelle requires a coinciding tree (for instance, in California it is often found on the coast live oak), and weather conditions are key, making them seasonal, as with fruit. In California, they are at their peak in November and April. As well, there are many imposter genuses that appear nearly identical, yet lack the flavor. In Holly Downing's "From the Woods," she has portrayed the coy fungi as a still life, harboring as much beauty as a rose.

Mezzotint is a form of engraving, whose subtle qualities are achieved with tone rather than line. The artist spends many hours "rocking" a copper plate until the plate has thousands of tiny holes, each with a bit of raised burr that hold a tremendous amount of ink. A fully rocked plate prints a lush, velvety black, unparalleled in any other medium. To obtain an image, the artist scrapes the surface of the plate, variously lowering the levels of the burrs so they will hold less ink and thereby yield gradations of dark and light. Gradually an image emerges out of the darkness. The plate is inked by hand and printed on an etching press.

Holly Downing, painter, printmaker and teacher, was born in San Francisco in 1948. She studied art at the University of California, Santa Cruz earning her B.A. in 1972. Her studies continued at the Royal College of Art, London and at Goddard College where she was in the graduate program in Europe. Between the years 1974 and 1980, Downing resided in England where she researched the mezzotint technique earning her M.F.A. from Goddard College in 1980.

Downing taught art for twenty-three years at the Santa Rosa Junior College and prior to that she taught briefly at the University of California Santa Cruz and San Francisco State University. Her paintings and mezzotints have been exhibited internationally and she is a recipient of fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts; the Greenshields Foundation, Canada; the Arts Council of Great Britain; the Graham Foundation, Chicago; and the San Francisco Phelan Foundation. Downing is an elected member of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, London.