The Parable of the Oxherder
By Patsy Krebs
Steamboat Springs, Colorado: Riverhouse Editions, 2009.
Edition of 15.
15 x 15"; 15 leaves. Ten aquatint etchings and open bit plates printed in blacks and grays on Rives BFK. Image 1 includes Gampishi chine collé; images 3 and 9 include 24-karat fine gold leaf. Text pages letterpress printed. Housed in a cloth-covered double foldout portfolio box lined in black cloth.
Patsy Krebs: " I am interested in eastern – particularly Buddhist – religious narrative because it has an abstract quality that translates to simple essential form. I am interested in mythologies and symbolic languages generally – even mathematics."
Patsy Krebs, "Historic Note" from The Parable of the Oxherder: "The Zen parable originally set forth as the Ten Oxherding Songs has its roots in early pre-Zen Buddhist writings of China. As Zen moved to Japan in the 12th century, the transmission of precepts by visual image became increasingly popular, with the Oxherding allegory interpreted by countless artists over centuries.
"Traditionally the koan-like narrative describes in poem and/or image the drama of Oxherder and Ox as they lose and find one another, exchange ascendency, achieve equilibrium, and finally transcend the world of phenomena altogether.
"Envisioned here in abstract form, the Songs are understood as various conditions of being, or interior situations, along the Way; the Dao."
The text, the artist, and the art become one in this book. Anyone who doubts the power of minimalist art, or of simple abstraction, may be in for a pleasant revelation.
$5,000 |
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