“I want to use this crosshatching to build a huge image, a huge image that would become another image… there are still mysteries to be explored on a two-dimensional surface.”
—James Rosenquist
The Kabuki Blushes is a lush example of Rosenquist’s “crosshatching” technique, interlacing delicate flower patterns with the kabuki face and plump tomato that call back to the 1978 lithograph Terrarium (lot 227). These interlaced forms allude to, as Graphicstudio master printer Donald Saff recalled, “the visual experience that comes from looking at a distant world through the leaves of the Palmetto Palm, which is so common to the Florida landscape.” Indeed, palmetto palms surrounded Rosenquist’s house and studio in Aripeka, Florida.
Rosenquist standing in the door of his studio, Aripeka, Florida, 1992. Courtesy of the Estate of James Rosenquist.
Literature
Constance Glenn 206 Ruth Fine and Mary Lee Corlett, Graphicstudio: Contemporary Art from the Collaborative Workshop at the University of South Florida, 1991, cat. no. 230
The Kabuki Blushes, from Secrets in Carnations (G. 206)
1986 Lithograph in colors, on Chiri Kozo paper, with acrylic monoprint collage in colors, on Somerset Satin paper, with full margins. I. 35 3/4 x 38 1/2 in. (90.8 x 97.8 cm) S. 39 1/4 x 41 3/8 in. (99.7 x 105.1 cm) Signed, titled, dated and numbered 59/59 in pencil, published by Graphicstudio, University of South Florida, Tampa (with their blindstamp), framed.