Wooly Lamb's Ear Portal

Hello, my name is Lucy Holtsnider. This piece is called Woolly Lamb's ear portal, and it's from 2024. The piece is a combination of various monotype prints that I printed on my letter press. I created many different colorful monotype prints over the course of the winter of 2023 to 24. Next I created a large number of these green um monotype prints that used a kind of white texture on top. I decided to cut those up and combine them. The woolly lamb's ear is a plant that's native to Colorado, and it has these beautiful soft leaves that really do resemble the ear of a lamb. After a rainstorm or when they get wet, the fibers on the leaves kind of clump together and form these beautiful rivulets and I wanted to emulate that in my monotype prints. The shape of the piece was not really planned - I was just creating these elements and layering them together and they seemed to kind of lend themselves to this arch shape. I had a few studio visits last winter in which the word portal kept coming up. I've never used that word in regards to my own work, but others came in and they found that that was the right fit for what they were seeing both in this piece and some other collages I'd created.