Moonlight & Structure

Doris Seidler

English by birth, Doris Seidler began working with Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17 in New York in 1940 and spent almost 10 years working there. This remarkable print is a result of trying to "destroy the plate" using multiple intaglio techniques, something Hayter encouraged.

This marvelous abstract color intaglio was created with engraving, etching, aquatint, and gouge, and was printed in color as a monoprint. The imagery reminds one of stretching out and lying down to view the night sky away from ambient city lights. Layers and components of the sky become visible as our eyes adjust to the darkness. A waxing crescent moon hangs above a sky dappled with starlight while a vortex of dark masses parade as constellations. The rigid dark structure of grids and intersecting lines suggest the constraints of mankind compared to the unbounded flow of the natural world.

Doris Seidler had been an amateur artist in England before her marriage and later, in her husband's business absences, Hayter accepted her as a participant in his wartime printmaking classes in New York in 1940, exposing her to the experimental approachs of Atelier 17. After returning to England in 1945 she emigrated to the US in 1948 and returned to working in the New York A-17 studio into the 1950s.

As an associate of Hayter's she learned not only the diverse techniques of gravure, but a philosophy centered on Hayter's overriding principle, "adequate motive", which meant that superb skills are not enough.

Doris's son, David Seidler, went on to become a screenwriter, winning an Oscar for his screenplay "The King's Speech", based in his own experiences with stammering which developed when the family came to America by ship during WWII.