£320 | By Rod Nelson | 36cmW x 34cmH

A woodblock print, entitled Garden in Summer - homage to Gertrud Kolmar.

Hand printed, signed and stamped by the artist in a closed edition of 50 on 300gsm archive quality Somerset Satin paper with colour-fast vegetable oil based inks by Cranfield Colours.

Price includes postage and packing. From the sale price of each copy sold, £100 is sent directly to Julian Marshall to further enable his work.

Garden in Summer - homage to Gertrud Kolmar

In his fascinating and scholarly tribute to Gertrud Kolmar, Philip Kuhn describes work that ‘is consigned to a no-man’s land floating somewhere between that still critical-lyrical innocence of Weimar and those unspeakable nightmares of Auschwitz’. This describes my reaction to her poem Summer in a Garden. I cannot hear such wonderful life affirming and powerful language without knowing what lies ahead for the poet.

The poet is in her garden with her lover almost lost in the sensual beauty of it. She looks to what ought to be the future but which we know, as she too might well have known, there was no future.

The metaphorical garden draws on the acid-induced dream worlds of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, but like all dreams, it is unstable. This is my sense of the magical creativity which still blinks at us from the Weimar times.  As she gazes out, the colour degrades to black and white, and then to darkness beyond the reach of the image. We know the power that this darkness had in consigning her Germany and herself to utter destruction.  A dark semi-human shadow figure is incorporated right into the vegetation that borders the summer garden at the foot of the picture. For now it is still, but this shadow has the potential to move. 

Please email julian@wigglylines.co.uk if you would like to purchase a print.