The monoprints titled Pollafukka Ravine #1 -#6 are based on paintings completed at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in County Mayo, Ireland in May 1999. They represent an evolution in my imagery and incorporate recent technical explorations.

The landscape of County Mayo in western Ireland is visually stimulating. It is magnificent on a large scale, and luxuriantly varied in its details. The terrain is physically demanding and the weather is dramatic, a combination I find ideal and emphatically not benign.

My six residencies at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation since 1992 have had a major impact on my work. Because these residencies are times of focused search and scrutiny, they yield the major part of my source material for the rest of the year: sketchbooks of on-site watercolor paintings. I build a sketchbook page by page, sentence by sentence, letting the accumulated images build into a visual essay. My vision "clicks" in response to particular kinds of spatial situations. The paintings on which the Pollafukka Ravine prints are based came from just such a "click" situation.

By studying topographic maps, and inquiring of local residents, I located a mysterious, mist-shrouded ravine cutting down a hillside. On the map it was marked Pollafukka. In Irish "polla" means a hole or source, and fukka, or phuca, or fooka, means "ghost" or "spirit" (as in pook or puck). Hence, the name translates as "Hole of the Ghosts" or "Source of the Spirits" or "Spirit Ravine." It fulfilled the promise of its name.

Climbing through mist, across fences and fields, among densely blossoming gorse bushes, up the rocky streambed, along muddy sheep trails, I found a magical place. As I peered through the scrim of bare branches, wet with rain and moss, at the swirling rush of spring water I saw in an unexpected way. A tangled thrust of leafless branches trimmed with new leaf buds crisscrossed the changing, rhythmic patterns of water. I found myself acutely aware of sudden shifts of focus, discontinuities of distance and level, layers of interference, and spatial ambiguity, . . . and the effort of looking. This experience translated into paintings, and subsequently prints.

Technically, Pollafukka Ravine #1-6 involved a combination of processes. Dark colors went down first, printed from a photogravure intaglio plate made from a hand-drawn film positive. Next I rolled each of two woodcut layers in several colors of transparent ink and printed them over the intaglio image. Working from a reversed image, to match the direction of the copper plate and wood blocks, I painted and rolled several layers of oil monotype on thin plastic. When transferred with the press these completed the print by adding spots of intense color, and deepening tonal shapes. The textural brushwork of the photogravure layer and the brushwork of the monotype layers integrate so completely that they are hard to distinguish. The flatter layers of woodcut provide underlying unity.