JENNIFER GARDEN
Letterpress printer, Jennifer Garden has produced colorful printed matter in her Napa Valley studio, Bluestocking Press for the last twelve years. Designs featuring hand set metal type and hand mixed inks ranging from cool chartreuse to deep indigos on heavy printmaking papers highlight the sculptural quality of letterpress. Jennifer graduated from Wellesley College with a degree in Philosophy and went on to take an MA in Musem Studies from San Francisco State University. Anne earned a BA in Art from Cornell University. Jennifer and sister Anne Garden have recently collaborated on a series of limited edition prints. Combining Anne’s talents in illustration with Jennifer’s writing and printing skills, the sisters have created vibrant descriptions of the some of the fruits and vegetables of the land they live on. The succulence of summertime tomatoes, the lusciousness of ripe figs, and the explosive qualities of corn-on-the-cob are described in four-color silk screens with letterpress text. Enliven your kitchen or dining room walls with bold culinary statements. The prints measure 14” x 21” unframed and are offered framed in natural maple with a variety of complementary mat colors. Click here for matting options.
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"Fig From its dull, gnarled branch
the first fruit pushes out, a bulbous green button containing nakedness.
Only after the fruit's emergence do the Edenesque leaves unfurl, creating
a lush umbrella under which, the silky cases each incite their mass
of edible-pink flowers to ripeness. To truly encounter a fig is to
pluck it oversoft and full from the tree... after a long wait cradling
the plump, sealed pillow in your hands, feeling for a place to begin,
and then tenderly pulling the fruit asunder with your fingers to hold
the bursting of rich, mellow sweetness."
Fig |
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"Tomato in the heat of Summertime,
the brilliant red-orange-green of the fruiting love apple. Succulent,
seedy, squirting flesh of it all, clinging green stems and leaves
brush you with their sting as you gather the plump spheres... anxious
to be picked, sliced, and combined with a handful of pungent basil
from the neighboring plot. How delicious it all becomes in its colorful
simplicity. Simple, but authentic. No thing like a genuine summertime
red... never in winter."
Tomato |
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"Corn on-the-cob is a fraction of the seed's history
that remains vividly implanted in american-yellow memories of green
summertimes. Asked to shuck, the child in us roughly strips the husks
and pulls flossy, silk strands from the ears, readying them for the
boiling bath. Now slathered with butter and over-sprinkled with salt,
our teeth meet the queue of kernels to begin our attack. Whether row
by row or circular in direction, the cob is dismantled explosively.
Pop, flint, flour, dent, sweet & waxy; the varieties of seed demand
laborious acts of transformation. The sowing and tilling, harvesting
and shelling, cracking and grinding, then roasting and grinding again
are too distant memories to compete with the messy immediacy of devouring
800 glistening kernels, fresh from the cob."
Corn |