The Big Rock Candy Mountains

The title borrows from the early twentieth-century American hobo ballad of an imagined paradise of cigarette trees and lemonade springs — a folk-utopian motif Summers reworks into a Western mountain landscape rendered in unnaturally sweet, candy-bright colour. Stacked planar peaks, a saturated sky, and the absence of any modelled shadow place the composition closer to flag or icon than to topographic view. Summers printed by inking each woodblock and then laying the washi over it face-up, rubbing the back so colour permeated the fibres; the resulting bleed gave every silhouette a soft halo, which here functions as alpine glow or sun-warmed haze. The use of folk-song and folk-tale references became more frequent in his late work, alongside titles drawn from sacred geography and travel notes. By 2001 Summers was in his mid-seventies, working in his largest formats, and the print reflects the late style's combination of monumental scale, reduced drawing, and intensified colour.