Carol Summers

Master printmaker Carol Summers brought a soft, painterly quality to his brightly colored woodcuts of simplified landscapes. Bleeding edges and transparent blocks of jewel tones fill prints such as La Terra Trema, illustrating the eponymous technique he pioneered of making hand-pulled woodcuts with oil-based inks and porous papers. The technique consisted of placing a blank sheet over his inked blocks, then rubbing the paper so that the ink seeped through—which allowed him to duplicate what appeared on the block instead of producing a mirror image. After the ink was imprinted, he sprayed on mineral spirits to create his signature blurry edges. Summers trained at Bard College and the Art Students League of New York; he studied printmaking with Louis Schanker. His prints are held by the Whitney Museum of American Art, Victoria and Albert Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and MoMA, where he has participated in several group exhibitions.