Lynwood Kreneck
Clown’s Long Swim, 2002
Screenprint
Paper, 16 x 15 inches; image, 9.5 x 10.25 inches

In this week’s random print by Lynwood Kreneck his iconic clown, perhaps a doppelgänger beneath the mask, swims between a floating hourglass and a melancholic skull. In the sky above, a bat spreads its wings displaying the message, ARS LONGA, art is long. Absent is the remainder of this Latin phrase translated from the Greek that began Hippocrates’ Aphorisms written in approximately 400 B.C.E., …vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile (life is short, opportunity fleeting, experiment dangerous, judgment difficult). Kreneck’s print is like a cartouche or rebus of this dictum illustrating how art is, how life becomes. The clown reaches out, adrift. He passes between two memento mori (reminders of death), toward some unbounded fate, perhaps a promised land of endless prints and printmaking. There is no shore in sight though, only more water to knife his way through. The clown passes from sun to shade. The evening beckons, the water darkens, and the clown persists.