Narcissus

Joe Liles, standing next to the cupola on top of Watts Hall.

Narcissus

1983

The jonquil, daffodil, and narcissus are really different varieties of the same flower. All of my family had a strong connection to this beautiful flower that comes each year to announce the birth of spring. Our own homeplace as well as the sites of the homes of our ancestors had large stands of narcissus flowers that have been there for generations. I wanted to honor the connection to this flower with a screenprint produced with eleven hand-cut stencils to capture the variations of yellows and oranges in the narcissus flower. I also started a technique of using blended ink for the background. I poured light blue ink at the bottom of my background stencil, a medium blue in the middle, and a dark blue at the top. I used a piece of cardboard to blend the ink on the screen so that a gradient tone of blue could be pulled across the screen and pressed with the squeegee onto the paper. This produced a sky image with a lighter blue on the horizon and a darker and darker blue as you rise into the sky. Our Earth’s atmosphere is often perceived like this on a cloudless day. This blended ink technique produces slight variations in every print.