Atlas, Puces de Vanves, Paris

Linda Lee Boyd

Printmaker Linda Lee Boyd presents the viewer with an intimate, captured moment, yet it is not photographic. Using a number of tools on the surface of the block she implies motion and direction, interrupted by solid blacks. She scrapes and pokes at the block to create a variety of textures, the overall effect being similar to an aquatint, but in wood.

This large color woodcut by Boyd was done in 2011. The subject is a man who has just purchased a terrestrial globe at the Marche Puce de Vanves, a flea market in the center of Paris. The buyer has hoisted the large globe onto his shoulder and, like the Greek god Atlas, bears the weight of the world on his back.

Boyd uses a variety of woodcutting tools to achieve the patterns and textures used on the various elements of the composition and the yellow and gray areas of the background are textured by printing the natural grain of the wood.