FLOWERED SNOWMEN 1996-2006

2006 notes on the Flowered Snowman drawings and prints

The Flowered Snowman series began as colored pencil drawings, in 1994. I was spending the winter in Wisconsin, and I’d wanted to deal with figures after a long period of “ideas.” Out for a drive one day I noticed, standing in a suburban yard, a snowman with leaves and twigs messily protruding; the figure had evidently been made of snow that had covered an unraked lawn. This gave me the idea for drawings of foliage-covered snowpeople.

The drawings were exhibited in New York and several other cities during 1994-95. Probably I made twenty-five in all. People responded positively to them so I looked for a way to share them with more. Work began on the Flowered Snowmen prints in 2000.

In the print versions, each flower and leaf on each snowman is made from a photo, either taken by me or scanned from a botany guide. That photo was then dumbed down — simplified so that it didn’t appear to be too photographic or overly detailed. (These creatures are creatures of the imagination, not of life.) Each individual layer was then further manipulated in Photoshop.

Figuring out how to make them and doing the (endless) work involved took six years. A single figure might be built from a hundred different layers, with each layer requiring its own color balancing, etc.
    Six years! Good that it took that long, as it turned out, because in that time the printing technology evolved and advanced considerably. By the time I was ready to print the six images, the digital print had arrived at the desired balance of photographic exactitude and archival permanence. It finally made sense to work digitally.

The Flowered Snowmen seem to be for children, but the emotional location they speak to is really for adults. You have to have lived a bit — emotionally and psychologically — to pick up on the experience of life that a Flowered Snowman represents.