Sunday Afternoon

This print shows Blackburn working in collaboration with another sort of artist's shop, a custom handmade paper mill. The composition, a strong and sensuous abstraction, still betrays Blackburn's lifetime commitment to European modernism as practiced in Paris in the 1940s and '50s and transformed in the United States by such American artists as Rothko, Gottlieb, and Nevelson. The print is the first production of the Dieu Donné Editions Club. The club is, presumably, both a fund-raising and public-awareness-raising effort on the part of the DieuDonné Papermill, Inc., a longtime supporter of artists' efforts to incorporate papermaking into their creations. There are original works from the papermill by Emiko Kasahara and Amanda Guest in the collection.