Lily Stockman: Wild Gentian

Lily Stockman’s monotype print Wild Gentian belongs to a suite titled The Geminid Prints, which she produced with the off-the-grid, solar-powered print studio Farrington Press in California’s remote Mojave Desert. Each unique work was made by woodblock printing a ground of Flashe paint onto handmade Japanese paper, and then overprinting the result with plates painted with etching ink.

Based in Los Angeles and Yucca Valley, California, Stockman draws on her experience of nature to create near-symmetrical abstract compositions in which shapes glow and vibrate with energy; The Geminid Prints suite was inspired by her sighting of the Geminid meteor shower while driving away from Farrington Press. “The marking of time, the fragrance of sagebrush, the thrill of solitude, the longing for my children, the sublime meteor shower,” she remembers, “all compressed into that moment.” In this print, a central form constructed from bands of blue and red, set off by a modulated field of buttercup yellow, suggests the titular bloom.