CALIFORNIA IN RELIEF: Thirty Wood Engravings by Richard Wagener
San Francisco: The Book Club of California, 2009. First Edition. Hardcover. This is copy 14 of 300 copies signed by Richard Wagener. Additionally inscribed and dated by Wagener to Gordon Van De Water, past president of the Zamorano Club, once on a prefatory blank leaf and again on the colophon. One of the leading American wood engravers, Richard Wagener has created a visual account of his wanderings throughout California in this lavish new work. In thirty original prints and short prose pieces describing them, he chronicles a journey that begins and ends in Los Angeles with stops in the San Jacinto Mountains, the Antelope Valley, Sonoma County, and the Sierra Nevada. Like John Muir and Gary Snyder, Wagener is a wanderer, explorer and observer of California, creating a poetry of place through both words and images, all born of actual experience. Not since Paul Landacre mastered the aesthetic and technical challenges of wood engraving in the early twentieth-century has any California artist achieved prominence in the medium. Wagener's images of nature - his stately Sierra trees, stark peaks and rocky crags - and his urban architectural monuments - the Pantages Theater and the Griffith Observatory - combine to make this work a deeply personal record of distinctive California locations. Introduction by Victoria Dailey. Prospectus laid in. Quarto. Designed and printed by Peter Rutledge Koch. Original tan paper-covered boards over a dark green cloth spine, with a Wagener engraving on the front and a printed paper spine label. A fine copy in the illustrated glassine wrapper and the publisher's slipcase. Fine / Fine. Item #75478
Price: $750.00