Arroyo

An arroyo is a dry watercourse cut into desert ground, characteristic of the American Southwest, where flash floods carve channels that hold water only briefly. Summers, based in northern California for much of his later career, returned often to Southwestern subjects, and Arroyo likely renders such a channel as a sinuous band moving across an otherwise broad, simplified ground. The composition would rely on a small number of large colour fields — sun-bleached earth, the cooler shadow inside the cut, perhaps a strip of distant horizon — rather than detailed drawing. Summers cut his blocks from plywood, inked them, and printed by hand-rubbing the paper from above without a press; the soft edges that distinguish his sheets came from spraying solvent through the back of the paper, which drew pigment outward into a halo along each contour. In Arroyo the technique would translate the dry, dust-softened light of the desert into pictorial form. The print belongs to the geographic counterweight of his career, the American landscape works that ran in parallel to the Himalayan and Indian travel prints rather than being eclipsed by them.