About the Cover Artist: Lane Twitchell

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A native of Salt Lake City, Lane Twitchell lives with his family in Brooklyn. He has exhibited widely in galleries and museums and has received numerous awards, grants, residencies, and commissions. His work is in collections around the world, including the Corcoran Museum of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Modern Art, New York City. A complete listing of Twitchell’s exhibitions, bibliography, and a selection of images is available at http://www.lanetwitchell. com. 

The Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters project takes its title from an Elton John song of 1972. Twitchell was attracted to the lyrics about New York City and its sublime and uneasy clash of cultures. He decided upon two emerging techniques to create the print: laser-cut paper and the rich colors of giclee printing. Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters is two sheets of paper that are layered, as are the paintings, to compose the finished print. The image was created by hand-folding and cutting paper which was then reproduced by commercial laser-cutting, a mechanization of the artist’s handcut technique. The background was created using giclee printing, sometimes referred to as Iris printing. In this case, the process involves pigmented inks laid onto archival-quality paper by a Roland printer. The laser-cut image is then affixed to the background print. 

Playing off the vernacular expression “morning, noon, and night,” the artist has created three prints, each with identical imagery but different color compositions. Morning is composed using pale, smoky colors characteristic of a city sunrise. Noon attempts to capture the cool, coastal light and urban soot of New York. And the bright colors in Night are intended to evoke the energizing, wildly colorful shades of Times Square after dark. By organizing the prints around these ideas, the artist has created a metaphor of the non-stop city, where pleasure and business commingle around the clock. 

Front cover: Mono. Lisas and Mad Hatters (Night) 

Back cover (above): Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters (Noon) 

Back cover (below): Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters (Morning) Laser-cut paper and giclee print, 10 x 10.” Limited edition. 

For a listing of productions by the Mormon Artists Group Press, visit http://www.mormonartistsgroup.com/mag/index.html.