The Power of Print:
Iconic Images of the American Landscape
JENNIFER BASILE

Basile synthesizes the landscape to reproduce it graphically. She eliminates the superfluous – colors and nuances – by eliminating tones and reflections and staying with a single stroke of a single color. She keeps the essential, the iconic, what can be printed with a single black ink. It is an abstraction process, although the result remains figurative. Once she has the image she wants, she takes it to a linoleum matrix, carves it carefully until she obtains the negative that she is going to ink, then prints it on high-quality Japanese paper.

This work, in its nobility and difficulty, brings to mind the preparation and care of a garden. The artist performs this ritual as a kind of meditation in movement, while the precise blows of the wedge discover the image. Her imagination takes wing in the created spaces, as it did in the garden of her childhood home. That is what the artist wants to convey to the viewer: she wants to share that experience and transmit her desire to preserve and care for nature.

Even when the landscape is urban rather than natural, she manages to capture and reproduce its essence. Here also, be it a set of buildings seen from a window, or a bridge seen in the distance between the clouds, the created space invites the viewer to flights of imagination.

What is captivating about her work, beyond the mastery with which she produces impressions that look like drawings, is its profound depth. One enters visually, and the imagination completes what is not seen. It transmits the peace and the majesty of the place, freeing it of all stridency.

Marina Wecksler