 All right. Hi, everyone. Welcome to another beautiful fall day. I mean, is this not nice? My goodness. October's been just as lovely as September wasn't a couple of very brief reminders. Winter lights that email that I was promising you is going out later today. That's December 15, which is a Thursday at five o'clock. And if you go online to get tickets, it's not difficult really just make sure you pick the right time. If you want to join us, we'd love to have you cell phones, please turn those off. And I just wanted to thank Alice in advance for the tour that she's going to be giving us a week from tomorrow on the very topic that she's going to be speaking on now. This is awesome. So now too many things in my hand. Okay, plus no light. Oh boy. Alice Boone is a curator of education and public programs at the Fleming Museum. She organizes learning opportunities and programming for K through 12 students and teachers, college students and faculty and community visitors of all ages. She's got to be busy right. She engages classes across the disciplines at UVM finding creative ways for more than 60 classes each semester to use the museum's collections and spaces for object study performance creative response and critique. She's a PhD in English and comparative literature from Columbia and taught college English and writing for several years at Harvard College UCLA and the University of Delaware. Before moving into the museum field, where she was most recently the woman's board fellow at the Art Institute of Chicago. She co curated the Fleming 2020 exhibit reckonings and curated the Rockwell Kent exhibit currently on view at the museum the subject of today's talk. Give a warm welcome please to Alice Boone is that this is on. Thank you all. Thank you all for having me and thank you for the many people who helped organize today's talk. I have, I have corresponded with many of you about planning today and then about planning the November 5 tour or tours that will will do with the museum. I hope today will be a kind of taste for that might entice you to come next Saturday because of course, these pieces will be looking at them on PowerPoint, where they're where they're actually quite large, but looking at them in person is is is a really unrivaled experience because they're such extraordinary pieces. I'm going to be talking about the title. Well, the title of this presentation is the iconic woodcuts of Rockwell Kent from the Ralph C nemmick collection at the Fleming right now we have these on display as one of our fall exhibitions. Ralph nemmick has the largest Rockwell Kent collection of prints in the world, and has generously loaned them to us for this exhibition. You'll see in a few minutes that I actually have a little asterisk for today. And it's, it's about that terminology of a woodcut will be diving deeply today into what that term means, and how Rockwell Kent grew to master the form. So some of you may be familiar with Kent's work in his in painting. He's well known for his landscapes, especially those of northern climates. He spent considerable amounts of time in Greenland in Southern Arctic Antarctic and it's in tiered El Fuego in Alaska. And with these paintings there they're really extraordinary oil paintings that are marvels of illumination of snow so that you can really see light glinting off of a glacier off of a snow scene and show you many many different tonalities of blue and gray and yellow is the illumination of the sun. He spent time in Alaska made this piece. And as he is enjoying the kind of solitude of living on a nearly alone on an island in Alaska with his young son and just one other person, where they chopped their own wood and caught their own fish to eat. So he received a package from a friend. Carl's a grocer sent him a package that contained a kind of provocation for him. It was his, his aggressors charged to his friend was, Why don't you try your hand at wood engraving. So he sent him wooden blocks. He sent him engraving tools paper ink and any other tools he might need. This is a provocation for someone who is used to doing things in these amazing shades of blue and gray. And really, and many, many other shades that oil paints afford him. And instead of a woodcut or wood engraving really gives you two values to work with black and white. So, we wonder, you know, why would his friends send him a provocation like that it nearly feels like a kind of creative dare. Well, Kent had actually been studying the wood engraving and woodcut forms. Here's what we have is a list of all of the books that he brought with him to Alaska. And as you're looking at his library. I heard some wows from the audience. I, you know, because I have that background in literature, I always want to know what's in someone's library. But when I look at this list, I, you know, I'm very struck by it. Because what we can see is that he's studying the works of people like Albrecht Durer, the great German woodcut artist, or William Blake, who didn't work in wood engravings but did work in plate engravings for all of his extraordinary contributions to the engraving genre with these nearly apocalyptic apocalyptic images. We see him reading a number of great epics, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Edda. We see him reading a lot of Nietzsche. The steak there thruster, one of those key books of existential German philosophy. This would come to really combine all together all of these sources in his library and it would give him his iconic style. And this is his very first wood engraving. And if this were my first try at wood engraving, I feel like I'd be really proud of myself. And one of the things that I, you know, I always like to ask people when we're looking at it is, how did he take his talents from being a painter into this very constrained form of having to engrave on the surface of a block. And the other things that would show absence that would reveal themselves as white when it was printed, but then the rest of the block is, is, is present so that you have most mostly black here. So how did he take that painting talent and apply it to a woodcut. Well, I see him striving for those moody skies that he shows so well in the landscapes, but he doesn't have blue or gray anymore. He said he has only black and white and so he makes these finely incised lines that nearly show a kind of moving sky behind the child picture here. He gives you stars that nearly look like they're in their sort of symbolic form of the five pointed star with rays radiating off of it and then illuminated by this sort of dark halo around and that sets them off from that moody sky. So we're working with the modeling of curves and muscles on the child's body. He gets a strong dark outline around the child's form, but then you can really see the illumination raking across the child's body so that you can see every curve every little every little bone that's illuminated there. We see him playing around with a texture, let's say in the child's hair that curly cue that he repeats again and again. That's him working out a kind of stylistic flourish that actually is quite hard to do if you're thinking about the grain of wood, working in those curly cues is really sort of breaking that grain apart. There are many other elements that I find really fascinating about this first wood, woodblock engraving. But one of them is especially that little steeple at the bottom there, nearly looks like we're in Vermont. And, and Kent himself spent time in Vermont but I have a feeling that it's actually a different kind of reference. I think that it's a reference to Albrecht Durer, who was the great German woodcut artist who Kent studied as he's beginning to make these, these early wood engravings. And you see that Durer, I've copied it here it's a little blurry because it's a low resolution image, but Durer repeats these steeples from the German hillside in so many of his wooden or woodcuts. And this is obviously a much more technically ambitious and subject. It's a very ambitious subject itself. But I see Kent really learning from his, the person that he modeled his work after, and including these little stylistic flourishes to show his debt to to Durer. One of the nice things about having a PowerPoint presentation is that I can show you these references that aren't actually in the show itself, but they get you, they get to help you make sort of deeper connections to things. All right, well, here's where the asterisk appears in today's presentation. There's a there's a terminology difference between a wood cut, which is cut with the grain of a block of wood if you think of carving into a plank of wood, you can see the way that the grain sort of makes these nearly strong horizontal lines so that you're pulling out splinters of wood versus carving into the grain itself of the end grain. That is the short grains is so you flipped that plank of wood over. That allows you to get a much finer engraving and finer line moved into the wood. Use these terms interchangeably he actually wrote a book called how I make a wood cut while working almost predominantly in the wood engraving genre. And so sometimes even in the Fleming's collection, those terms get used interchangeably and they actually are quite different in not only their technique, but also in what you notice about them. There's just one example that is in this Fleming show. Here we have a great example of a wood cut by the artist Ron Slayton was a Vermont artist who is work really flourished during the works progress administration. And you can see that that Slayton style looks nothing like Al Richter. He's going for these sort of rough hewn gouges in wood. He is cutting with the grain of wood so that he can pull out large splinters of it. We spend a little bit of time on Slayton's work in the Fleming show and I'm excited for you all to see that in person if you if you come next Saturday. In order to not only show you the stylistic difference, but also to think about how this idea of what a wood cut could be became so popular for artists like Kent and Slayton, even as they work in different aesthetics, as they're thinking about how to get art made accessible to a wide group of people starting really in the 1920s and 30s. There's an idea of how to have you make art accessible to everyone, which I feel like is a great topic for this group, right, education and enrichment for everyone. This is a key idea for Kent himself. He's thinking about how only one person say sees a painting, or only one person possesses a painting. If you make prints, then many people can have access to owning and appreciating art, so he can make additions of say 75 or 100 and distribute them. And this way, many people can access the real joy of owning a piece of art. He and many artists are experimenting with these means of reproduction and they don't see it as copying. Everyone gets an original because every pole of a print is actually slightly different from another based on the way that the ink is applied based on the print that's made. So he sees this as everyone having access to originals and the engraving process for him as a way of redistributing access. This is another one of Kent's kind of iconic images, and you'll see how different it is from that, that bluebird print that we began with. One of the obvious differences is that this is a black outline on a mostly white print, whereas the other that we saw was mostly white lines on a black background. One of the real difference here is that in this, in this print, most of the surface of the wood has been removed, so that only the outline is left as a relief, so that it's printing only that black outline. Whereas in the others, right, we have that black background and the, the incised designs were actually done in white. That's in the other kind that white on black, but this one is notable I think for him again once again trying that star illumination. This will become again a kind of icon for him. So here he has these white stars illuminated by this dark outline and then this hints of the illumination around them. Here I think that he's really referencing the great English poet, radical and engraver William Blake. So if you remember the songs of innocence and experience and William Blake loved this figure of the lamb as a kind of poetic icon of childhood innocence and Kent was drawn to that as well. William Blake is an engraver who really finds ways of experimenting with all kinds of graphic design on his pages made at the end of the 18th century. So he writes his poems and then he has these illuminations around it. But he also has much more apocalyptic scenes. This is from an engraved edition of the book of Job. And I won't spend too much on it I really only want to draw your attention to the stars at the top. Those stars look familiar don't they. This is a kind of visual reference that Kent is pulling from and then remaking in his own work. Here you see another this is another William Blake engraving from that book of Job, and the illumination behind that top figure's head. Well, an artist like Kent who's drawn so much to illumination on snow is now drawn to how you do that in a wood engraving. Here is Kent working from paint form. The ways that the rays radiate out in these concentric circles and making these shapes across the water. And here is Kent adopting that in this wood engraving style. So again, he only has two values, black and white. It's kind of creative challenge for him as to how to make this illumination look like this. So I believe he really turns to William Blake to think about those things, but a piece like this, this is called Twilight of Man. It is a, it's an illustration that he made wood cut wood would engraving illustration for a poem by Thomas Hardy that imagines kind of the end of humanity. And what I find really striking about this is that for Hardy, the poet, the end of humanity is this moment of sort of grief, maybe somewhat somewhat of nostalgia, but Kent has turned it into a scene of real beauty I think here. And I see that really in those rays that are illuminating from the moon. And nearly you can't really tell whether this is day or night at first you can see the stars on the dark part of the background, but this dark sun or dark dark moon that's radiating black rays just feels like such a revelation as a as a as a kind of artistic experiment to make illumination with black on white. The moonlight is raking across this figure who slumbering for Thomas Hardy the poet this slumbering was a kind of a reproach of humanity, but I see something more hopeful and Kent's image. And this is illuminating him and turning him into one with the landscape so that you can nearly not tell who's a hill and who's a person here. This is again that modeling that we noticed in the first wood engraving that he did here he's really adopted it and it's something that's even more abstract. Here is the lovers from 1928. And once again we have that illumination, breaking across these bodies so that they once again looked abstract and artists like Kent is used to painting landscapes and so he always wants to find where his light is, but he's actually bringing many other professional experiences into this work he was a set designer, and this to me looks like a stage set, or even something like it's anticipating noir film. 20 years later, so he's thinking about how how bodies are lit. This is a woodcut that is mostly that black background. These slivers of the illuminated faces and bodies pop out from that very, very dark inky inky rectangle around them. All right, well, here's the pop quiz. Since we're now experts in what is a woodcut and what is a wood engraving. I want to ask you, what medium is this. This is a wood engraving because I told you that Kent makes very, very few woodcuts. All right. This is a this I like to call this a Fleming mystery. Oh yes. Don't they, because they're how he makes that that sky right this is something that would cut artists have done for centuries is made that that gray sky out of those finally in sized white lines but they're irregular here that seemed to suggest that it's the splinters that have been gouged out. This is a Fleming mystery. Because in our collections database that has all the information about these pieces. This is listed as a woodcut. But knowing what I had researched about Rockwell Kent I was I thought to myself, well, is it really a woodcut because that would be rare. I did not know how deep this mystery was going to get. Because I went to Rockwell Kent own book of his works, where he talks about his process there are a number of essays that he's written about the about his technique but also his wider social work. And he describes this piece. It's actually a little it's a little tiny thumbnail of it in the book as a pen and ink drawing, and I was flummoxed. And so I started inviting people to the museum to hear their thoughts on it and feel like figure out what their hypotheses were. I guess I'm saying this on television. I touched it, which you're not really supposed to do I did it with gloves on. I just wanted to see where the ink sat on the page. Because if it were, you know I felt like I could maybe see the, or feel the way that the ink was sitting there was it had been pressed on had it was it sitting on top of the page. Could I feel the maybe the strokes of the pen. I smelled it to see if the if the scent of woodblock ink was still there. It's about 100 years old so no. And then I went to, you know I went to Google, and I did a reverse image search of it. And it turned up actually as a poster image that Kent had designed in 1921. For the junior arts league. But that didn't quite help me, because it didn't tell me what the original was. This was given to the Fleming Museum by a man named Henry Schnackenberg, who was a Vermont artist spent quite a bit of time in New York was friends with Rockwell Kent, and who gave the Fleming many, many objects in the collection. And so we thought well okay Henry Schnackenberg is his friend so maybe this is the original and we're we have a number of original drawings that Schnackenberg gave us maybe this is it. Then I found at the Minnesota Institute of Art that they have the original pen and ink drawing. So that that then led to the question what is this. This is a photo mechanical reproduction of a pen and ink drawing meant to look like a woodcut. And that might seem very esoteric, but the deeper question for me is, why, why would he make a photo mechanical reproduction of a pen and ink drawing meant to look like a woodcut. You know as I looked more into his work, I found that he did this all the time. So, in his book Wilderness, which is his account of living in Alaska. You see him making these kinds of illustrations this too looks like a woodcut, but this is also a pen and ink drawing. So he's mimicking the form of a woodcut in order to work out this aesthetic. It's very important to him. That aesthetic confers authenticity. That is, it confers the kind of labor that goes into engraving into a block of wood. It confers the authenticity of calling back to Albrecht Durr or to the, the, the radical printmaker William Morris in the 19th century who really tied woodcut aesthetics to the labor of of tilling in the fields. So just as this little harvester figure here has a scythe, Kent is pretending that he himself has a gouge that is gouging into a block of wood. He does this work over and over again in his career. And it becomes a kind of aesthetic that confers that that sense of solidarity with laborers with the toughness of making all of these wood engravings. But he uses that aesthetic to make all of the illustrations for Moby Dick. He makes 280 of them, all of them mimicking that woodcut style. This piece, this drawing of the Ubermensch from Friedrich Nietzsche's The Spake Thera Thrustra. This is a kind of meditation he was making again in Alaska as he's doing all of this deep reading and transforming his own aesthetics. And this figure will recur over and over again in Kent's work such that it nearly becomes a kind of calling card for him. And the editors of Vanity Fair called an indelibly Rockwell Kent figure. This, this illustration is a lithograph which is a different kind of print. The Fleming show has many of those and I will be excited to show you all those there. And they included him here because you recognize him as he recurs across Kent's work. He is the strong massive silhouette, the dogmatic line, the note of mysticism, the tactical hardness, almost a woodenness. So here's that would again, all employed in the presentation of a lonely dramatic and mysterious figure of man thrust up against the desolate inimical sky. This figure will recur in Kent's work. Here he is on a ship. I, these two figures have really captivated people as they have come to visit the Fleming, and they captivated Kent's, Kent's admirers at the time, as he adapted both of these figures into multiple book plates for private commissions. I love this figure because he, he's not quite the same as that tactical hardness of the man that we saw on the cliff in pinnacle just now. This figure seems to be poised between grasping aspiration, right that hand that's reaching into the hand into the sky or hands, and then repose of lying probably on the deck of a ship. One knee raised ready to spring into action but also one knee down in order to rest. These two figures really like they're illuminated by that starry sky behind him. Notice he's not making those symbol symbolic stars with the five points anymore. He's grown more confident in his ability to create different kinds of illumination such that we see something like the Milky Way behind him in one seat, or this undulating flame and the other. When you look up close at these in person, you'll see that he's carved these very, very, very fine white lines that suggest the rays coming off of the flame here. It's not too hard to see in a kind of blown up PowerPoint. That's how fine they are. That's the craft that we're really thinking about. Oh, he calls this a kind of. Well, he calls this his, his style, and other other curators who've worked with with Kent Kent's work have called it a kind of dark sublime, a trembling in awe before the inky darkness. And the illumination is just there to show you a bright way to go, but it's, it's small in comparison to the large sea that's around you. I think that he's really drawing from the kind of dares that Japanese woodblock print makers would give each other to create different kinds of illumination in their own woodblock engravings. So the Japanese woodblock engravers like Hiroshi, or Suzuki Cassone here. They, they're notable this is in color of course, but they're always trying to find different ways of showing illumination of fire on water, or of fireworks, or other kinds of illumination. It's nearly a kind of creative constraint, like the one that Kent was working with. And here he's really working in just black and white. So this is Bow Sprint from 1930. More of that milky way illuminating the figure here. The light source is showing off every kind of every kind of muscle in his calf. But for those realists in the audience, we're wondering, what is he doing. He's been on the, on the, on the bow, on the bastard home with, with only lit by the Sun, or only lit by the stars around him. What is he up to. What is he up to here clinging to the mast with the other rays of some kind of illumination around him. What are these figures. Well, I'm sure that no one here is going to guess that these were originally yacht advertisements. So Rockwell Kent is not showing you the product in this advertisement. He's showing you the aspiration, the sense of freedom of liberation. All of it you're sort of grasping to as you grasp the as you grasp the ship itself. So these are made as advertisements for American car and foundry they ran actually without text. So you're just seeing the image just seeing the getting the feeling of what he wants to present to you. And this was such a popular initially confounding ad campaign that it actually was celebrated in an advertising annual as advertising that breaks the rules. So it's not going to present. This is what the luxury yacht is here all the gleaming, you know, the gleaming mechanisms of it. No, it's showing you the sense of what you might aspire to or imagine if you were on it. His advertising career really paid his bills, and it made his work iconic. That is it appeared in in magazines like Vanity Fair both as advertisements but also as his work in house illustrator. It appeared in Christmas cards. Rockwell Kent loved Christmas. And, you know, he loved Christmas for I think sentimental family reasons, but I think also because it was a perfect place for him to try out as many forms of this illumination is possible. So here's a child reaching to put the star on top of a Christmas tree. This mystery has been rendered nearly abstract is just a black triangle with these little candles illuminating it. And really the focus is on again that sense of aspiration of reaching for something. And there is another form of that black on white on black, where, instead of being illumination of stars were actually seeing underwater. So this is bubbles from a whale in an inky sea. And in my initial asterisk. This looks like a woodblock print in the way that he's made these finely in size lines like we saw in that initial bluebird, but is in fact a pen and ink drawing. Kent made those 280 illustrations for Moby Dick over four year period. That's a lot of illustrations for a very big book. The creativity to be showed in creating 280 different illustrations to show that the real encyclopedic nature of Melville's book, just really inspiring. It became a kind of icon of the story itself, arguably that lakeside press edition, which is published in three editions in 1930, really helped make Moby Dick into a canonical American novel, where it had initially been thought of as a failure when it was first published in the 19th century. So, these images, these icons of it helped bring it into the American consciousness as a quintessentially American story. I love these pen and ink drawings that again look like woodcuts, just for the kind of variety of the action here. Melville's name doesn't even appear on the on the on the cover. It's so much a Kent production. Kent continues making these kinds of commercial endeavors. Here is a Christmas gift that he he produced as a it's essentially it's a gift for the employees of the The Wirehouser Timber Company. Everyone got a PR escrow wood engraving as a gift that would appreciate in value later on. The Wirehouser escrow is another it's a it's essentially it's an adaptation of the wood engraving form where you're printing with two colors that that ochre, and then the black in order to produce different kinds of illumination and shadow. And it's a it's a technique that many, many different kinds of many different artists have experimented in. But I love how here he takes that again that inimical sky, the hard wooden man, and here he is actually chopping wood. And the way that the color washes across him only enhances that stylistic iconicity that Kent's work has. Again, not a wood engraving but I thought I would share it with you all as Vermonters, because in 1936 Kent, who had attained some fame as an artist, but also as a labor supporter and leftist artist. Kent was called to West Rutland by the strike aid committee for the workers who were on strike against the proctor marble company. They had been on strike for months they weren't receiving wages and so the strike aid committee asked Kent to come in and raise awareness, and also money by selling editions of his artwork. To promote the workers cause Kent was more than happy to do so he had actually supported the lakeside press workers, that is the people who had produced Moby Dick. In their own strike earlier in that in that decade. So here this 1936 illustration focuses on the workers families and the and the and the hardship that it created for them. This is the design itself, but it says 1775 and one corner and then the date of the strike 1936 and the other 1775 is a key kind of date for Kent to refer to, especially for Vermonters because it links the work the strikers with Ethan Allen. So he quotes Allen below in the name of Jehovah and the continental crop Congress. So he's linking Ethan Allen that sort of into marker of independence in Vermont with these strikers, which is a very canny move on his part because the strike had divided the town. And so he provides a kind of figure that they can all aspire to that unites them. And then he, he and others preside over this public hearing where workers shared their stories. He also produced illustrations that were similar to this one. This is the cover of new masses from 1937. This is workers of the world unite. And, you know, to compare this to Kent's first woodblock illustration from the from from 1918 is really to see him recurring many of those stylistic flourishes. Clouds of smoke in the inimical sky that's behind him, but he's still showing off that technique of all the different ways that he can illuminate something that is immaterial. Then we have this figure who's lit such that you can see every single muscle modeled. He's carrying a shovel, he's poised and ready for action he has that that landscape behind him. But I always wonder, where are the other workers here. Right. This is about solidarity. It's about like promoting unions. Then where are the other ones. But remember that initial description from Vanity Fair of the single man thrust up against the sky. Because though Kent really can't. He can't do groups of people in the same way that he can do these single single figures. And maybe that's actually the constraint of working in a woodblock which is a relatively small format. So he decides to focus on one to give you that sense of people unified. I love my presentation because that is that that's sort of where we get to with Kent's woodcuts, but I would engravings as we as we now know. But I am eager to show you more of his lithographs which extend his political art making as, as you're able to come to the Fleming. I'm happy to take any questions now. Yes. Do you want to hold off one second so we can get this so we can all hear. What do you think the 1775 to 1936 meant right there on that picture. So I believe he's linking this date of another question. I he's linking the date of the strike with Ethan Allen's own. Last of defiance in Vermont. So he's linking the Continental Congress and the move to remove themselves from the yoke of the British with removing themselves with from the yoke of the boss here in Rutland. So this is his, this is his tie to Vermont's favorite son, Ethan Allen here. Okay, and on the pre preceding picture. I've never seen that word before the failure. The failure, or was it follow follow. Oh, that's an L. Okay, then I get it. Yep, he's he's a he's working on the tree as a, as a timber man there. I'll comment on the last picture that you showed us the solitary man has so much more impact than any group could ever have had. I agree with you I think that's why Kent bras from it, iconically, even as he is a part of many, many unions or many unions, and is always supporting solidarity of groups of people, his icon really can only be a single solitary person here. I'm wondering if I'm going way back here now, if, but if a copy of one of his woodcuts or wood blocks was shown in the written candied. Oh, I'm so glad that you asked because candied is my favorite book. His Kent indeed produce the illustrations for candied. They are fine. Pan and ink drawings that don't do many of the same kind of dramatic skies here. Instead they're very simple. These are some of my favorite, it's my favorite edition of Candied and I've seen nearly every edition of Candied I curated the Candied at 250 years show at the New York Public Library several years ago. So I got to see every edition and every way that those unusual vignettes from that globetrotting story are illustrated Kent produced 95 color hand colored illustrations for that for the first edition of Candied in 1928. And there's, you know, there's 95 of them. So there's not that many UVM library the special collections has a first edition of the non color edition, which itself very special and very beautiful to look at, but it's not the hand colored one. My favorite thing about the candy that Kent produced is that, and you'll have to see this if you come to the exhibit is that he produced these little tiny and they're smaller than, they're smaller than my fingernail little figures that are in every next to every sentence. They just seem to be that everyone is in a different pose. He calls them dingbats, so that it appears that there's little tiny figures floating among the text. And if you recall the story of Candied is about what humanity looks like in 1759 after the earthquake to see all of these writhing figures is to be reminded of humanity, literally in every line. He really speaks to what a special, what a special illustrator he was that he worked so intimately on book design with with printers who who who were creating the book. His woodblock printer Elmer Adler, who kind of every printer has to have every time an artist makes a print they really often work with master printers in order to make sure that the, you know, the press is working correctly. His collaboration with Elmer Adler who did all of his would would block engravings was a friendship that would last him for for his life, and would create many professional opportunities for him, including working on these deluxe editions so Elmer Adler was not only a master printer he was really more of like an impresario who created these opportunities professional opportunities for Kent to try his hand at different kinds of printing. In the slide, the destiny of destiny of man. On the left of the structure, the woodcut. There's a bunch of structures on a hill. I'm wondering if this is making reference to skyscrapers, or to maybe stone heads type of things or did he meant to read it as a question mark. That's a great question I guess I have always seen them as stonehenge like, but I love this possibility that they also could be more contemporary and that we're actually the ambiguity of the image, just something that artists kind of love to play around with the ambiguity is whether it is something that is calling back to an elemental part of man, or to something that man has produced. And it's a great. It's, I feel like I'll, I'll, I'll use that line and the rest of my tours. Because I think that's a great ambiguity to question there most people have tended to see it as stonehenge as messalists, or is something monolithic, but it is indeed more than that. And in how it is reaching both to the past and to the, to the possibility of no future. Speaking of ambiguity, what I see in that picture is to the left our left of the moon or the light is praying hands at just you can see fingers. That's wonderful. That's really wonderful is that again that the way that the light illuminates and then suggests figures really does give you the opportunity to see, to see more in a rock face. Speaking of this picture since you have it up. I'm also seeing what sort of like a claw like hand underneath the skyscrapers or the stonehenge. Moving back toward the body. What I really wanted to ask about though was the, the one with the mast. Just really strikes one as a cross. I wondered if that was reading too much into it. No, I don't think it's reading too much into it at all. You know, cross is never just across right. And if this one, this one I find very interesting because he actually makes a painting form of it, 10 years earlier, more than 10 years earlier, which really it doesn't have this same kind of virtuosity of the the rays illuminating and the waves beneath him. It really does focus only on the figure and the mass the cross above him. And I, I, you know, this does have all of that Christian symbolism, but my I actually always goes downward to the virtuosity of the waves behind him and the rays. I nearly feel a kind of competition between Kent and that Christian image imagery, where it's there, but he really wants to show off how he can do waves. One more, if I may, the, the fall or again, it's sort of unclear to me what he's standing on. It appears to be like a plank set into the middle of the height of the tree. That's what it is. That's the, that's the technology that they were using. Why so many timber company workers went on strike for, for their for added safety precautions. And I actually I never looked into it to see whether the wire house or timber company workers ever went on strike like so many of the other actual Americans and companies that he produced imagery for, like they did like Lakeside Press, or like us steel. We don't have any of the us steel would would engravings in the Fleming show, but he produced these again these like very muscular people working at the steel yard. Very same year us steel goes on strike, which for and for someone who is working for them who's getting a paycheck for them but who also supports labor rights is actually kind of a it's a it's a productive generative contradiction that he has to work through as an artist. And then goes to the technique of how did he do this, and artists often make sketches beforehand of how they do. And so, do you know whether they did, they'd work with white paint on dark on dark paper, black paper or. Next question. I don't know the answer to that. I, you know I've seen the painting versions of some of these when he he's essentially adapting his own work, but I have not seen the sketches of any of the wood engravings. I've seen the sketches that he made for Moby Dick and for Candide which were, you know, pencil drawings that then turned into pen and ink drawings, but his tech, like his process for sketching out what a wood engraving looks like. I, that's a great thing to look more into. You have to think in reverse. Exactly. In the Fleming exhibition, we have a whole room of Vermont artists who are responding to Kent's work, or taking up that same question as to how you produce originals in print form for more people to show social messages. So Ron Slayton, this woodcut artist is one of those artists, but Francis Colburn, whose name might be familiar to some of you as a Vermont artist, we actually have this wonderful, wonderful demonstration kit that he produced for the works progress administration. That is how you make a wood engraving, and he shows the white paint on a black background in taking you through the steps of how you make a wood engraving he does a very tiny little block to show you the process, but this demonstration box would have been used as a teaching aid for people to realize that anybody can make a woodcut. That turns out not to be true. As I have tried to make a woodcut and ran the gouge through my thumb. But many people can make a woodcut. Anyway, these these demonstration boxes we found in the Fleming's collection we also have a how to make a lithograph and how to make a lino cut, which is a linoleum print, and they are wonderful artifacts of the works progress administration. This sense of sending artists out to teach others to make art to democratize the art making process. And just, you know, they they they've they've seen where, because they were used in and traveled around, but they're incredible artifacts of this belief of this experiment really to put art and art making tools in the hands of many people. And to see them as just a real delight. Great, we have a zoom question. In what ways, if any work hence artworks influenced by the wartime experiences of Americans. Oh, that's a great question. And it's one that I think is especially illustrated in his lithographs which I didn't include in this presentation. And as a leftist artist, he raised the alarm, let's say, of the rise of fascism during the Spanish Civil War in the in the 1930s, as the Nazis came to power. He has a really remarkable painting that was then turned into a lithograph a print. It's called heavy heavy hangs over thy head of a sleeping baby with a gun, a rifle suspended over its head, and then a rat, gnawing at the strap that's holding the rifle. This is in 1945, as an illustration of just the kind of the, the, the, the dread that is setting upon people. He warns against the rise of fascism in the United States, as he's called to testify for the House of Un-American Activities Committee. And then he, he refuses to answer their questions and says he's not a communist, but he pays the price professionally for that has his passport revoked and ends up actually sending much of his work over to the Soviet Union. So that wartime experience. It doesn't radicalize him because he was already radical but it gives him the opportunity to use the printmaking medium to spread a message in as many different forms of media as possible that baby, the heavy heavy hangs over is over thy head. It sounds like a grim idea but it was actually a Christmas card. It was his Christmas card in 1945. And that's that's what the wartime experience had done to him. Anyone else. This has been terrific. Really, really interesting. Thank you so much, Alice. Thank you. Thank you all. And I really do encourage you to come to the Fleming if you can, or his works are available so widely that it's wonderful to just sort of search out and see how many different pieces he made. And how ubiquitous his style could become as he worked in advertising book illustrates book illustrations and political illustrations. Next Saturday. Yes, yes. And I said to Betty that I would be happy to do one at 130 if there were too many people because we want to have a nice intimate conversation like this one has been. Um, so I'm happy to do it twice if there if there's a lot of people who are interested. And we checked out the parking. And there's a good sized lot that seems to not be that busy between the island chapel and the Fleming. So there's a there's a. What if you were going towards the lake on cochester Avenue past the hospital there is a town there it's not marked for the name that leads you into really I think there'll be plenty of parking. I, if you use that lot between the Fleming and that it's it is west of the Fleming between Ira Allen Chapel and the museum that lot is is large. There's a smaller lot that is between the hospital and the museum. That one could fill up. So you have ample parking in the other spaces. Yeah, well there's a there's a dedicated museum parking lot that fills up quickly. It's small. That's one if you're going up to the hospital it's on the right. But there's also on the weekends the ability to park in the big lot which I recommend. Yes. We will see you next week. Thank you so much.