La Grande Cascade

Sylvia Solochek Walters

Sylvia Solochek Walters commented on her woodcut "La Grande Cascade":

"'La Grande Cascade' is a 1983 reductive woodcut inspired by a trip to Paris that my husband Jim and I took a year earlier. While there, we visited the Bois de Boulogne – a large and lovely park in the heart of the city that is also home to La Grande Cascade, which according Michelin is 'A charming pavilion (1850) just a stone’s throw from the [park’s] large waterfall (Grande Cascade)….' (And it is charming indeed - see the image in the fan.) We spent most of the rest of our time in some of the city’s spectacular museums represented in the print by the red background tapestry pattern from a medieval needlework we saw at Musée de Cluny ('The Lady and the Unicorn')and the big foreground vases seen at Musée Guimet.

"The reproduction of Elizabeth Vigée Lebrun’s famed portrait of Marie Antoinette 'taped' to the surface of the print actually hangs in the Metropolitan Museum. However Madame Vigée Le Brun was a prominent French portrait painter of the late 18th century who served as court painter to Marie Antoinette, the notorious last Queen of France before the French Revolution. We saw several of her paintings in Paris and came back to the states with the postcard image I used in this print."

Walters' work began in the late 1950s with strong black and white figurative compositions, and gradually incorporated more subtle narratives, such as decorative surfaces and reflections. She developed an inventive technique with stencils, which allowed her to develop a full color palette in her prints using a single block of wood. One of the effects of her technique is an embossment of the shapes due to the firm pressing of the block into the paper in the printing process (see the second image).

Walters learned the technique of color reduction woodcut while studying at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, from printmaker Alfred Sessler, considered by many to be the originator of the reduction woodcut in the U.S.