70° West

$50 USD

- Includes Domestic Shipping

Handmade lithograph featuring a lighthouse. Limited and numbered edition signed by artist. The miniature image in this fine art edition is 1 11/32 in. x 1 1/32 in. printed in black ink on hand-torn piece of German etching paper measuring 2 9/16 in. x 2 in. Categories: Al Young, Lighthouse, Lithograph, Maritime
Product No.: 3.00.0196.010

Availability: In Stock

Item can ship by Friday, 16 January, 2009 through USPS Priority Mail with Delivery Confirmation

70°W

by Al Young

The two-color image consists of black ink printed over a beige flat on German etching paper

Print documentation is provided online for collectors.

Behind the Scenes

During my boyhood summers, I liked to ride my red and white bicycle down town to the public library on Main Street.

In my memory, the library was an old brick building that sat back from the street behind a wrought-iron fence. Its windows were set in painted wooden casements built in days when casements contained iron weights that hung like limp sausages from the ropes by which they kept the sash suspended. My peculiar knowledge of the inner workings of windows had come from my parents’ renovation of the old two-story house in which we lived on South C. But that’s another story.

Inside the library I walked among the tall rows of books with summers stored between their pages. Books with threadbare covers, worn through to the gray and battered book board’s edge, whose thick pages had been thumbed at the corners until the corners had worn round. And there were other books whose bindings had been covered in a canvas coated thick with glossy paint. The bold letters of their titles had faded in the company of cover illustrations that were fast becoming ghosts.

Among such books there were always stories of summer vacations and lighthouses and unexpected adventure. There were stories about boys who somehow had their own little boat and were allowed the freedom to roam and to solve wonderful mysteries. Somehow the stories were better than anything I could conjure up even though our little town still had alleys that cut through the blocks behind the houses and the old mansions that stood among the twisted branches of ageless oaks.

And so this little print is a picture of all such places still hidden in the pages of books remembered only by the sunlight in the heart of a child who read them once in the warm shade of an old tree by the front porch. 70°W was featured in the May-June 2001 issue of The Storybook Home. In an article entitled “Images of Childhood and Home,” Al Young talks about some of the significant aspects of the image. For example:

Creation attempts to supply the want of something. Wherever creativity is manifest, it involves looking not only into the void, but looking at the outlines of the void, and from those outlines conjecturing about the shape of what’s missing.

The complete article is available in the May-June 2001 issue of The Storybook Home.

Framing the lithograph

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