Aurora Boracha

Aurora Boracha — a Spanish-inflected title roughly evoking a tipsy or reeling dawn — pairs Summers's interest in atmospheric phenomena with the wordplay he often allowed into his late titles. The image presumably renders sky-light as bands and arcs of saturated colour rather than as observed naturalism. His standard procedure depended on cutting separate blocks for each colour and then printing through the back of the sheet, so that ink permeated the washi and produced the softly radiant boundaries that became his signature. Without a black keyblock, hue itself carried the drawing. A dawn or aurora subject is well-suited to this method: gradations from rose to violet to ultramarine can be laid edge-to-edge and the bleed-through dissolves them into one another without manual bokashi. The print sits within the broader Latin American group Summers produced after extended stays in Mexico and Central America, where local light and folk colour entered his palette and pushed his landscape work further toward abstracted reverie.