Cascade with Dippers

Janet Turner

Chico, California printmaker/teacher Janet Turner began combining printmaking techniques in the mid 1950s and by the 1960s was making it integral to her images, as with this composition, done in 1971 in a variant edition of 175. She used both color linocut and screenprinting (serigraphy), a stencil process, with embossed lines. It's especially significant to note that there are no two impressions exactly alike in their color, as even in the complex, labor intensive process she employed for each piece, she found time to experiment with tonality and hue.

Turner depicts a small American Dipper, America's only true aquatic songbird, in its preferred environment, a stream of water cascading down the side of a rock face as it searches the water for food (it can swim and walk underwater). The Dipper's nest seems to be found in the upper left corner of the composition. Turner's subjects were often informed by the world of nature and wild creatures, especially the avian members.

Turner commented about her work: "...My work comes from my evolving knowledge of social, biological and ecological relationships. My observations through my art have led to new awareness and have increased my sense of amazement, wonder, my concern about man's impact on the world, a feeling perhaps imperfectly conveyed to others. I am awed by the richness of nature, interested in details of fur and feathers, which have meaning because they evolved from the relationship of one thing to another..."