Ardyn Halter | The Mycological Prints

Mycologia, 2022

Silkscreen on Somerset paper

Signed in pencil

Numbered from the edition of 60

Printed by Kip Gresham with the studio’s blindstamp

Paper and image size: 510 x 450 mm

"Each year Suillus (Slippery Jack) appears just for a brief two or three weeks, and where we live they can be so abundant, that it’s hard to find enough friends to give them away. The skein of their umber and sienna caps peels readily but leaves deep nicotine-like stains on the hands that can take days to remove. Under the cap’s skin the flesh of the mushrooms is pale citron-yellow.

One colour gives way to another. This reminds me of how animals and birds see colours differently to us humans. The colours that we associate with experiences are deeply personal.The emotion expressed by one colour may better convey one’s experience of a quite different colour.

I think that Kandinsky and Matisse understood this.

In this print, the deep scarlet, blending in from the right side of the print towards the centre, is not in fact red at all. It is a transparent ultra blue, stealthily working in the print, which feels right, because fungi are, at one and the same time, subtle and brash, stealthy and overt."