Picturing Places and Spaces

Arthur Secunda created this silkscreen proof based on his multicolor lithograph, Canyons and Mesas, from 1972. He captures the topography of the site through sloping lines to suggest the canyon and with a series of horizontal lines to indicate plateaus that finally meet the evening sky at the horizon. Exposed rock surfaces sometimes reveal stratigraphy and other times are filled with patterns that look decorative, much like designs of a Native American blanket. In this creative interpretation of the site, he captures the grandeur of nature in silvery tones.

Secunda was born in New Jersey, and during his youth studied at art schools in Detroit, Brooklyn, and New York. In 1947, after serving one year in the U.S. Army Air Force as a staff artist for special services, he attended New York University and the Art Students League in New York. Later he traveled to Paris to study painting, to Rome to study sculpture, and to Mexico to study woodcarving and wood printmaking. He received two grants from the Tamarind Institute, which was founded to revive the creative medium of lithography. Secunda's first one-man show was in 1950, and he continued to exhibit around the world during his long career. In the 1960s he taught at the UCLA, Pasadena campus. He is best known for his landscape images, and he has noted that he works from his imagination and wants to convey the "feeling" of his surroundings through his images. A wide range of his work can be viewed at the Arthur Secunda Museum at Cleary University in Howell, Michigan.