Amanita muscaria

Holly Downing

This image is from a new 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. 18 copies are available for $2,000.00 each and can be ordered at: hollydowning@comcast.net.

Amanita muscaria is arguably the most iconic toadstool species of fungi. It is a large white-gilled, white spotted, usually red mushroom. All Amanita muscaria varieties are noted for the hallucinogenic properties. This species associates with various deciduous and coniferous trees.

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.