This time with a little color.

I have been moving forward with my small print series of shunga/erotica/quick sketches and have etched one image/plate and almost finished another. Meanwhile, I cut color blocks for this one and pulled a couple of color proofs using my baren and today quickly inked and proofed the zinc plate with a small table press on top of the color work already laid down.
I'm using a textured Italian etching paper and my zinc plates weren't highly polished so there's a lot of plate tone that is going to greatly influence the final result. 
I think this isn't bad for a color test--I will probably flip color tones for the male and female shapes and try to get it to print a little cleaner.

Naked

"mons Veneris", A/P. 2016;  watercolor wood block print (moku hanga).
Printed from 2 blocks on Magnani etching paper for the Baren Forum's 68th print exchange.

I scribbled this in the margin of a notebook with a felt-tip pen. But it could just as easily been sand or clay, or on a tile wall or the peeling paint of an old building.
Totem or magic? Symbol of desire or of power? Sex or the power of birth? But decidedly
NOT a metaphor of Art or Beauty nor an idealized form of the perfect body.
One squiggly and jagged line that becomes legs and pubis and vulva.
Nude as in naked, the person unclothed, without the personalities that wait in our closets to be put on mornings and we take off at night.

Elbows and pubic hair, callouses and wrinkles and surgical scars are all as worthy of my time as a vase of flowers, the view from my window,  or a bowl of fruit in the afternoon light.