This six-foot long etching  was  entered into Art Prize Grand Rapids two years ago and won the curators choice award from the Grand Rapids Art Museum.  It is now in the print collection of the Detroit Art Institute and on permanent display at  the Midwest Museum of American Art  in Elkhart IN, the Grand Rapids Art Museum and Kalamazoo College and then some private companies. 

 

Kalamazoo River Songline

Ladislav R. Hanka         2010

      Kalamazoo River Songline is a map of home - the watershed I inhabit; provider of my water and nourishment; source of my inspiration and place of refuge. Such a portrait of home ground calls for emotional content that goes well beyond cartography, lists of species or superfund data. Decades of stalking the banks with sketchbook, binoculars and fishing rods are what I must transcribe with my stylus and acids into zinc plates, ink and paper.

     The Songline became my model: an aboriginal record in story, song or painting, of places and mythic events connecting all of Australia. Songlines originated with a Dreamtime being who walked about and sang the world into existence. They have been used to orient travelers, initiate youth and create a lasting devotion to the ancestral spirits – for 40,000 years. This is a model of relating to home ground that has stood the test of time.

      My Songline is constructed on the armature of a loosely drawn Kalamazoo River - arising near Jackson, dipping down to Kalamazoo and flowing into Lake Michigan near Saugatuck. I’ve inscribed ghost-rivers above and below to echo and intertwine with the watercourse. These spirit-streams are suffused with voices of the last red-shouldered hawks as well as newly resurgent osprey. Spawned salmon contribute their molecules to silt beds, rich with mayfly wigglers, at whose edges fiddlehead and papaw emerge. Bowfin (or dogfish) appear to me and so I draw them. Luna moths and maidenhair ferns share the space with other creatures, whose tenure in the plate is but a memory, a wisp of plate tone or bypassed intent. Every molecule of the zinc plate has felt the caress of my hands - for months - as the drawings went down and were often again sanded away, leaving stray marks and partial images, until the whole summed to a chorus - some voices distinct and others mere harmonics or vague undertones.   A tipping point had been reached and the Songline found its voice.

Kalamazoo River Songline

Etching with aquatint and Drypoint

2010     image: 2 ft x 6 ft

Print 3,500/ 6,000 framed