Ravanna's Palace Burning

The title refers to the episode in the Ramayana in which Hanuman, sent to find the abducted Sita, sets fire to the demon-king Ravana's palace at Lanka — an image embedded across South Asian temple sculpture, manuscript painting, and shadow puppet theatre. Summers, who travelled extensively in India and absorbed its iconography, here translates the scene into his own colour woodcut idiom rather than copying any specific source. The composition likely centres on a vertical architectural mass dissolving into red and orange flame, with the surrounding ground reduced to broad, flat fields of contrasting colour. His characteristic soft-edged halations, produced by spraying solvent through the back of the sheet so that pigment bleeds outward from each shape, would suit the subject of fire particularly well, the contours of the blaze blurring into smoke. The print sits within a thread of his work drawn from Asian narrative sources — alongside the Himalayan landscapes and the Hindu temple compositions — and reflects the syncretic, travel-fed reading of South and East Asian material that distinguished his output from the more abstract American printmakers of his generation.