My colorful curtains in "Colliding Auroras" was, I must say, an overly ambitious attempt to "capture" the northern lights in a rather imaginary way -- which included a broad range of color possibilities not likely to ever be seen together. Also, there was an abstract and "impossible" perspective in their design. The "collision" was interesting to me and it was enjoyable to immitate what one might see as these "celestial crystals" propogated.

Technically, this silkscreen (or serigraph) was a major challenge for me since it involved 55 seperate silkscreens, each having a seperate stencil (for each color to be printed). At this writing, I do not recall just how long the printing process took. It was certainly more than three weeks. Stencils for each color were created and then adheared to the stretched silk-like fabric. Ink was then "squeegied" through the stencils onto white glossy print paper. Each "screen" was then cleaned with chemicals and a new stencil was then adheared to the same fabric. Positioning of each was critical to the registration process.

I sometimes admit to people what happened when the last color (black) was printed. It involved the purchase of a very large squeegie so that ink would be evenly spread over the entire screen on just one pass. Unfortunately, the rubber edge of the new squeegie was extremely sharp and stiff. As a result, it "tore" through the lacquer stencil material on the silksceen itself. This damage caused a massive amount of black ink to flow onto the previous 54 colors already printed. I was completely beside myself as I looked down at the destroyed print. In all, the editon would eventually yield 29 good looking prints. The memory of this printing mishap stayed with me for a long time however, because I attempted FOUR times to fix the stencil before actually accepting the fact that it could not be saved. Four images were lost in a pool of black ink. It was not until my literally walking away from the job to take a long night-time walk, when I was then able to settle down. The following day, I started the process over and all went smoothly. My patience was certaily being tested earlier. At times I thought my mood was on a collision course itself.

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