Lingering Still

Minneapolis-based artist Michael Marks explores the fragility and resilience of nature in his work. Lingering Still is inspired by the landscape around the Vermillion River in southwestern Minnesota and the prairie reclamation sites there, which, for Marks, exhibit beauty mingled with distress. His prints across media—lithography, woodcuts, intaglio prints—use a subtractive mark-making print process, which the artist writes, “parallels the potential for irreversible loss in the environment.” Here employing spit-bite etching, an intaglio technique, he creates the dark passages of the river landscape and then applies a stopping out varnish to the plate to represent the wiry prairie grasses, left in reserve, thus the white color of the paper. The hardy, dense vegetation, shown growing wildly and expansively across the river valley, despite pollution and agricultural runoff, becomes in Marks' hand a thing of beauty, representing nature’s enduring strength.