Black Mountain

Edmond Casarella

Though he is best known for his collagraphic cardboard relief prints Edmond Casarella also worked in direct relief methods, like this large Abstract Expressionist woodcut he titled "Black Mountain".

Edmond Casarella’s studio not only accommodated a printing press but the tools and space needed for the creation of his sculptures. As such, he had on hand a variety of implements that lent themselves to his experiments with printmaking techniques, and in the elegant, brooding “Black Mountain” the viewer can witness this process in the staccato patterns gouged into the block with the aid a power tool.

Only a certain kind of artist will try to wrestle the unembellished, bare face of a mountain onto a sheet of paper or a canvas, and be successful in its portrayal. It is an unforgiving subject whose beauty is shrouded in the weight and violence of geological time.

In “Black Mountain” Casarella has depicted the stoic profile of a granite formation with direct but nimble aplomb, using what instruments he had to capture the subject's indomitable spirit and wrestle it onto a wooden block in relief to then transfer the inked surface to a simple sheet of paper.