Nightwork

Herlinde Spahr

Like the patterns of lines made by waves on a sandy beach, these images were destined to be erased. They exist for a flash as the artist spins the levigator over the limestone surface, creating and destroying billowing landscapes with a swift curling of the disk. By the time that the stone achieves its blank ideal of a marless, scarless polish, the artist has witnessed the birth and death of a thousand gyrating worlds, a thousand heavens of wheeling stars. These too are creations, each apparition uniquely shaped by the speed of the spinning levigator, the size of the grit attacking the soft lime, and the amount of water flooding the stone. Though fugitive and evanescent, these images speak with a force all their own, whether destined to exist for posterity or not. Indigenous to the lithographic process, they have remained hidden as private visions appearing only to the artist graining the stone.

Nightwork presents a portfolio of seven levigator lithographs that capture the seven stages of graining a stone with ever finer carborundum grit. —Herlinde Spahr