Why Girls?

I did not ask for the metal girls.  I had wanted to develop my painting skills; instead, they took away years of opportunity.  Those experimental, crazily inked linocuts turned out humans that talked to me and suggested how I could flesh out their implied personalities.  I did try to ignore them, but my daughter insisted that I do at least a few for her. So there I was.

Where did she come from? She was a classmate in a drawing class.  One day we were assigned a classmate to draw in different ways.  The drawing that drew me in was the simplest of all, a blind contour drawing (we were told to draw quickly without looking at our paper).  I later learned that she was going to die if she didn’t get a heart-lung transplant.  I think I tried to process the shock of that when I did the linocut.  I later did What’s in the Cards?: To Live or Die? to honor her (see evemero.com). However, in my studio the image evolved to represent any number of imagined characters.

Why the combo with metal?  Well, I just happened to have a piece of copper lying around in my studio and I tried it out with an image I had printed.  They looked destined to be combined. But what about other images?  Would other metals work better? Soon I was trying out as many metals as possible to see what could be done.

This became a game with strict rules that dictated I had to use the same original image (but the line shape could be modified) and all mark making had to be done by printing.  I did deviate slightly when on several occasions, I only silkscreened text.