TitleMammoth Falls
Artist
Clare Romano
(1922 - 2017)
Date1986
MediumColor collagraph on cream wove paper
DimensionsSheet size (2 sheets, each): 30 1/16 × 22 5/16 in.
Overall: 60 1/16 × 22 5/16 in.
Other (Backing board): 62 × 24 1/4 in.
SignedSigned in graphite at BR: "Clare Romano".
MarkingsWatermark: ARCHES / FRANCE
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, Gift of the artist, 1998
Object number1998.18
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."Romano has often combined media when creating prints, just as she has in this work, a collagraph and woodcut that required four plates in all, two for the upper half and two for the bottom. "Mammoth Falls" 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. The artist produced a series of small sketches on site that were then worked up into large charcoal drawings in the studio. These served as the basis for the prints. The areas of color were printed first from the collagraph plates, then the black areas from the woodcuts. With landscape and architectural views as her primary sources of inspiration as a printmaker and painter, Romano has produced several major series such as this.
