Lying Awake: Seventh Night

Herlinde Spahr

Within the image of Lying Awake: Seventh Night is the poem “The Quivering Board” by Spahr that was reversed in the printing process. Spahr wrote the poem in pencil on the verso: “Don’t think that the heavens / don’t look down on us, / a world of roots, of girth, / the apple’s downward fall. / They wait and wait and listen with care, / so rare is the sound that travels up high. / Like the diver on his springboard, / bearing down with all his weight / to become weightless, / breathless at the apex, / a soul of muscle in thin air. / The gods don’t know how close we’ve come. / They only hear the quivering board, / the splash when bodies / come back to earth.”

Spahr wrote the following about her Lying Awake suite: “These works evoke the territory of the imagination, when thought is submerged and rendered helpless. Surrounded by darkness and silence, the outside world peels away and vision originates from within. Logic and reason become scaffolding. It is soothing to draw on solid stone when trying to capture this nebulous realm.”

Herlinde Spahr, printmaker and author, was born in Antwerp, Belgium on December 19, 1952. She was an exchange student in Greene, Iowa under the program Youth for Understanding for the school year 1971-1972, and then attended the School for Dramatic Art in Antwerp, Belgium in 1972-1973. Spahr received her MA from the University of Antwerp, Cum Laude, in 1977. That same year she moved to Northern California as a graduate student and, in 1987, she received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California Berkeley, Cum Laude.

Spahr began exploring stone lithography in the early 1980s when she discovered an old Griffin press at the ASUC Studio on the UC campus. Her current studio, Lithium Press, is located in Orinda, California. She began her career making lithographs printed from limestone but, in the 1990s, she printed collaged lithographs from stone onto Formica. Recently Spahr began creating unique works on large panels of Formica incorporating techniques from printmaking.

Her work has been featured in the books The Best in Printmaking. An International Collection by Lynne Allen and 60 Years of North American Prints.1917-2007 by David Acton. Spahr has written a series of articles about the nature of printmaking and she published three books documenting her work.