TitleBig Falls
Artist
Clare Romano
(1922 - 2017)
Date1986
MediumColor collagraph and woodcut on cream paper
DimensionsSheet size (top sheet): 29 3/4 × 22 1/4 in.
Sheet size (bottom sheet): 29 3/4 × 22 3/8 in.
Overall: 59 1/2 × 22 3/8 in.
Edition15/150
SignedSigned in white pencil at BR: "Clare Romano".
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, Gift of the artist, 1998
Object number1998.19
Label TextBorn and raised in Palisade, New Jersey, Clare Romano attended The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. She continued her studies later at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Fontainebleau, France and the Instituto Statale d'Arte, Florence, Italy. For her long and distinguished career Romano has worked in nearly all media of painting, printmaking, and drawing, but it is her collagraph prints for which she is best known. After her artist husband, John Ross, returned from his military service during the war, the two proceeded to refine their printmaking techniques, helping to develop the collagraph, or paper relief print, a medium which both continue to work in today. The couple has published two seminal instructional artist manuals: "The Complete Printmaker" and "The Complete Collagraph.""Big Falls" is a large collagraph printed on two sheets of paper and is part of a small group of works the artist created beginning in 1984 as a response to a visit to Vermont in the summer of that year. This print and its companion work, "Mammoth Falls," were first conceived in small drawings that the artist created in situ. These small sketches were then worked up to large scale black and white drawings, even larger than the prints, in Romano's studio and served as the basis for the collagraphs. Working in collagraph afforded Romano to explore the greater graphic possibilities of the landscape and to add color to the images.
