Galactic Fountain

Galactic Fountain is one of the more openly abstract sheets in Summers's late catalogue, where cosmological subjects begin to displace the Himalayan and Latin American landscapes that dominate the middle career. A fountain of stars or radiating colour-jet implies vertical or radial composition built from concentric or arcing colour fields, each cut on a separate block and printed through the back of the washi so that ink saturated the paper and softened the edges into halation. Without a keyblock to enforce drawing, the image depends entirely on the boundaries between colours, which the bleed-through method renders as glowing penumbrae rather than cut lines. Summers had pursued non-objective colour woodcut intermittently since the 1950s, when his Bard training under Louis Schanker placed him close to mid-century American printmaking abstraction; the late cosmic prints return to that idiom while applying the technical refinements developed across decades of travel-based landscape work. The 2001 dating places it among the larger sheets of his final productive years.