Moonbow

A moonbow is the rainbow produced when light from the moon, rather than the sun, refracts through suspended water — a phenomenon faint enough that the eye usually reads it as colorless. Summers's print of 1967 takes this rare nocturnal optical event as its motif, composed as a luminous arc rising from a darkened landscape. The subject suits his method well: by inking blocks separately and pressing pigment through the back of the sheet, he could persuade color to glow rather than to sit on the surface, and the bleed of ink into the dampened paper produced precisely the kind of halated edge a moonbow requires. The 1960s saw him moving away from architectural and figurative motifs toward landscapes built almost entirely on light effects — sunsets, eclipses, moonrises — and Moonbow belongs to that line of work. Within his catalogue the print marks a deepening of the optical, near-visionary register that would carry him through the Native American and Latin American series of the following decade.