Northern Lights

Northern Lights renders the aurora borealis as bands and curtains of saturated colour against a darker ground, a subject ideally matched to Summers's bleed-through woodcut technique. Laying inked blocks beneath face-up washi and rubbing from the reverse, he allowed pigment to permeate the fibres so that every colour boundary became a soft luminous transition rather than a cut edge — the same effect a viewer perceives in an actual auroral display, where green, magenta, and violet shade into one another without hard outline. The absence of a black keyblock, characteristic of his mature work, leaves colour itself to carry the composition. Aurora and night-sky subjects recur in the final decade of Summers's output alongside Galactic Fountain and related cosmological pieces, suggesting a shift from the geographically located mountain prints of the 1980s and 1990s toward more elemental, atmospheric motifs. The print belongs to the small-edition handmade colour woodcut tradition Summers pursued for over half a century, distinct from both ukiyo-e revivalism and commercial reproduction printmaking.