Always a Face in Nature - Grasshoppers

Elizabeth de Gebele Ginno

The delightfully strange “Always a Face in Nature - Grasshoppers” is an example of Elizabeth Ginno’s sense of design, intaglio printmaking, and composition, as well as her willingness to inject humor into her work. A scene-within-a-scene, it appears on the whole to be a drawing of a garden’s offerings, with flowers and insects scattered throughout. Upon closer inspection, it’s a dynamic, graphically sharp piece, with mirrored, alien imagery and a face formed by the individual elements of the work, a la Guiseppe Arcimboldo or Salvadore Dali. Stylistically, however, she retains the eye of a graphic artist, with clean lines and precise texturization.

Ginno took inspiration from a variety of genres - Surrealism, non-representational Abstract Expressionism, Cubism - and worked in several printmaking mediums, constantly exploring shape, line, and color. Ginno was a chameleon, able to shift from style to style with ease, likely due to her lack of inhibition when it came to finding new paths of expression.

Ginno would eventually become more well known for promoting her husband John Winkler’s work, and to some degree she set aside her own pursuit of art. Nevertheless, her varied, fascinating output, with roots in classical training and a style that was defined by curiosity, retains a niche in the California printmaking world.