Volcan Fuego

Volcán de Fuego, the active stratovolcano in Guatemala's Sierra Madre, supplies the subject of this 1971 print, one of several Latin American landscapes Summers produced after travels in Mexico and Central America. The combination of woodcut with stencil noted in the medium line is characteristic of his procedural openness in this period: he frequently overlaid hand-cut paper masks on the inked block to control the migration of pigment through the back of the dampened sheet, allowing him to isolate the cone of the mountain from sky and lava field as discrete color zones. The result is a composition in which the volcano reads less as topography than as luminous event — the eruption rendered through bleed and halation rather than through descriptive line. Within his oeuvre the volcano prints sit alongside the moonbows and eclipses as studies in atmospheric incandescence, and they prefigure the Esperanza and Mexican-coast subjects of the later 1970s. The print also exemplifies how willingly he augmented relief printing with stencil to extend the chromatic range of a single block.