Monstrously Remote, reduction woodcut, serigraph, 13 unique variations, approx. 30 x 45 inches.

Whenever I start thinking of my love for a person, I immediately draw radii from my love—from my heart, from the tender nucleus of a personal matter—to monstrously remote points of the universe… the dreadful pitfalls of eternity, the unknowledgeable beyond the unknown, the helplessness, the sickening involutions and interpenetrations of space and time.   Vladimir Nabokov Speak, Memory

Jody Isaacson and Andrea Hull collaborated on a woodcut/silkscreen image derived from Isaacson's photograph of the interior wall of an old barn, through the chinks of which afternoon light pours into the darkened interior.  The constellation of chinks insists upon the vastness of space which is contained in all human architecture, even during daylight, the time we most overlook it.  The print is entitled Monstrously Remote,  after a passage by Vladimir Nabokov in which he discusses an arc of emotion connecting him to the "sickening involutions" of "monstrously remote" space and time.  We are now developing the companion piece to Monstrously Remote--a silkscreen print, smaller in size, but of a much larger scale than the woodcut.  In contrast to the first print, which originated with a photo, this image comes from our imaginations.  Its subject is an impending summer thunderstorm cupped in the gap between two hills in the Blue Ridge of Virginia.  The print's interest will lie in the quality of light illuminating the green hills of the Blue Ridge, stung with a red barn, shining brilliantly with the lowering, sickening bruised sky.With Monstrously Remote, the feeling is of escaping from an enclosed, dark interior into the starry firmament.  The smaller print, in contrast, evokes the feeling of the sudden, sickening drop of the barometric pressure that occurs right before a huge summer storm. The vista is large, the feeling oppressive.  The subject of both pieces is their quality of light.

Special thanks to the Creative Project Grant, Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County, Maryland  and Clara, Ferenc, and Mari Gyorgyey. for providing housing and cultural history.