Micah Schwaberow created this portfolio of five small color woodcuts featuring the large scale of Yosemite National Park in California, views from Tuolumne Meadows. The images are titled: "Dawn, Lyell Fork", "Morning, Tuolumne River", "Afternoon, Tuolumne Meadow", "Day's End, Lembert Dome", and "Twilight, Unicorn Peak".
This portfolio is presented in a gray linen bound folding box. Each print is numbered "42" while the total edition varies between 80 and 92, the result of the artist rejecting impressions he felt were not of the quality he wanted.
The suite, Tuolumne: Yosemite, Book I, is accompanied with a typeset broadside that states: "Micah's watercolor-like miniature landscapes require 5 to 7 carved wooden blocks and up to 15 separate color impressions to form an image. He prints with dry pigments and water on dampened, handmade Japanese paper using an old hand-cranked Vandercook proof press." The individual woodcuts are matted in two-ply rag mats, which are also individually signed, titled, dated, editioned, and housed in a folding, gray linen covered portfolio.
Tuolumne Meadows is located at 8600 feet along the Tuolomne River in Yosemite National Park and has a good view of the Cathedral Range and Unicorn Peak (to the south), Lembert Dome, and Mount Dana (to the east). Schwaberow depicts the valley in a panaromic series, done in different daylight, which illustrates the beauty of the valley throughout the day.
Micah Schwaberow, printmaker, painter and sculptor, was born in Eugene, Oregon in 1948. He studied painting with Maurice Lapp and printmaking with Elizabeth Quandt at the Santa Rosa Junior College in California. In 1981, he spent a month in Miasa, Japan studying traditional woodblock printing and, in 1982, he spent most of the year in Nagai, Japan studying with the Japanese master, Toshi Yoshida, and his master carvers and printers. In September of that year, he was an assistant for his teacher during a three-week woodblock course for foreigners.