Donner Peak Tree #3

Richard Wagener

Donner Peak Tree #3 is a woodengraving created in 2014 by American printmaker Richard Wagener (born 1944). It is pencil signed, dated and editioned 11/18. Donner Peak Tree #3 was printed by the artist on a sheet of ivory Twinrocker wove paper and the image measures 5 x 3-1/2 inches.

Donner Peak Tree #3 was created the year following Wagener’s publication of the Sierra Nevada Suite in 2013. He wrote that he would have included all the Donner trees in the suite if he had had them completed in time. Peter Koch’s introduction to the suite is appropriate to this image:

“Keep close to nature’s heart…and break clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean,” (John Muir). “John Muir reminds us that a life lived without great rocky outcrops and ageless tress as a part of one’s native landscape would be a life deprived of one of the greatest resources of the sublime…In the Sierra Nevada there live trees as old as Sumerian phonographic script and Egypt’s Bronze Age Middle Kingdom – there for you to lean against and smell…alive…sap oozing from the cores of the oldest living friends we have. Richard Wagener’s engravings capture an essential quality of that friendship—nearness and an austere clarity.”

Richard Wagener was born in Texicana, Arkansas in 1944. He studied biology at the University of San Diego and earned an M.F.A. in painting from Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. In 2006, Wagener established the imprint Mixolydian Editions for his own fine press projects. He collaborated with David Pascoe of Nawakum Press, Santa Rosa, California, co-publishing three fine press books, one of which, Loom, earned the 2016 Carl Hertzog Award for Excellence in Book Design.Wagener has also produced a number of engraved bookplates that have been collected internationally. He designed the logo for the XXVII FISAE Congress held in Boston in 2000. His bookplates have been featured in Print Magazine; “Contemporary Ex-Libris Artists,” an article by James Keenan, that was published in Portugal in 2003; California Bookplates by Robert Dickover, published by the Book Club of California in 2006; and Three Centuries of the American Bookplate by James Goode, the catalog accompanying a show of bookplates at the University of Virginia from 2010.