Project Description

Clare Romano is an American printmaker notable for her fascination with landscape. She was especially moved by her first encounter with the Grand Canyon in 1975. She responded not only to the colours of the landscape and to intensity of the light, but also to the dramatic monolithic formation of the canyons. Her simplification and abstraction of these overwhelming shapes gave a new dimension of sparseness and strength to her work. Her reaction to the landscape also brought about contextual changes in her collagraphs. For the first time, she started making bleed prints. A bleed print is an image that reaches to the edges of the page, where no white margins are left. Romano felt that any borders would belie and diminish the majesty, the endless vista, of the subject she was portraying. Romano’s prefered medium allows for this technical progression. A collagraph is a textural printing process that begins by shellacking a collage of materials onto a “printing plate” surface that paper is later pressed upon. The paper is embossed with the collaged materials and is later colored. Romano first captured her inspiration with small pastel studies. She later turned her sketches into these grand prints.

-Susan Bonta, Class of 2018

Object Details

Clare Romano (American, born 1922)
1975
2007.2.26
22"x30"
Color Collograph
Gift of Gerry and Shelly Elliot