Before "The Absence," there was...

...."Liebe von Volkswagen"

Love of the Volkswagen is right. I've always had a soft spot for VWs. Nothing quite looks, smells or sounds like them. They are perfectly imperfect without apologies. They strive to be nothing else, they are copied from nothing else. In high school, I drove a 1976 VW Rabbit (not for long) & finished out my senior year in a turquiose 1965 Beetle. In 2000 I bought a VW Jetta TDI and have put 175, 000 miles on it. It is dinged here and there. It makes suspicious sounds at times. It is much more imperfect than perfect since the day I drove it off of the lot. The passenger window fell out again but I just love this car. What can I say, love of the volkswagen.

This print was my first try at reduction printing. For those of you not familiar with fine art printing, I used the same piece of linoleum to print all four colors. I started with white, then cut the lino for light gray, then cut the lino for dark gray, then cut one last time for black. This means I had to print in between all these cuts. AND to add extra adventure, I used no means of registration for alignment, just eyeballed it....cuz I like to add a pinch of madness to everyday life :-P

As I do not own or have access to a printing press, all of my prints are completely hand-pulled. It is a bit scary to do just one print, let alone 4 prints on top of each other! In the end, it turned out pretty cool but I am not sure when I'll do another reduction print any time soon.

Fortunately, I got some good prints out of this effort and you can check them out in my Etsy shop!