Crossing the Date-Line

 

Ynez Johnston

  1920 - 2019 (biography)

1966  

color etching from two plates with stencils 

8 15/16 x 11 7/8" platemark 

pencil signed, lower right margin 

13 of 40  

pencil titled, and editioned 

San Francisco Museum of Art, 1967, cat. no. 45 

unidentified cream wove 

published 

Roten Galleries, Baltimore; chop, lower left margin 

24122 

$1,100.00 

"Crossing the Date-Line" was published by Roten Galleries which was based in Baltimore, Maryland. Roten sold prints through pop-up exhibitions at universities, museums, and private galleries throughout the U.S. and Canada. As a result an artist's work got national exposure and was often collected for the institution's collection. Scholar/curator Gerald Nordland noted about Johnston's graphic work: "Johnston utilizes the multiple perspective devices of the etchings, flattens space, integrates foreground, mid-ground and background into a Byzantine-modern composition. The units of effect....has a forceful, expressive, and abstract quality not dissimilar to the stone tessare in Byzantine mosaics. The total effect is formal, unique and masterful." Her work was also described by the International Graphic Arts Society: "Man - cosmological and metaphysical - is the referent and point of departure for the symbol-like forms which Johnston has developed, although these defy identification with recognizable objects. The forms of man's culture are seen as parts of a living organism, of man himself: not 'mere' man as the segmented biped, but as the expanding universe of his consciousness. The architecture with which he has encrusted the earth partakes of the turbulent life of its builder....cities, cultivated regions, diversified and discrete, all are alive, and all - sometimes through the mediation of himself as a beast - all are a part of this single, mythical, human organism."