The David B. Smith Gallery and artist Gregory Euclide recently released a series of prints from his Laid Down & Wiped Away project. Euclide teaches high school in Minnesota and during his twenty-five minute lunch periods began creating temporary paintings within that short allotted time frame as a demonstration to his students and an aesthetic challenge. The works have now been reproduced in a special edition of ten portfolios chronicling Euclide’s experiments on his classroom whiteboard with each including eight pigment prints measuring 16 x 20 inches (signed and numbered), a set of white museum gloves, as well as an original Sumi ink painting. In addition to the collector portfolio, six of the eight images documenting the results of this creative experiment to date will be available for purchase individually. For those interested, take a look at the gallery’s webstore here.
“I was thinking about the fact,” Euclide said, “that I could make something impermanent and then sell the image of it. In our culture, there is a strong emphasis on reproduction and the original seems less important. My students were shocked when I would erase the original, because they saw it firsthand, and they were disturbed that it was destroyed. People who do not see the original have no problem only looking at it on a screen or as a print, but once you see the original it is hard to let it go or believe that it could be destroyed.” Euclide relates this concept to society’s impact on the natural world by stating, “When people get to know nature and spend time in it, they start to realize how their actions affect it.”
Discuss Gregory Euclide here.
