Notes on the Flowered Snowman Print Series

David Robbins

The Flowered Snowman series began as colored pencil drawings, in 1994. I was spending the winter in Wisconsin, in between exhibitions in various European cities, and I'd wanted to deal with figures after a long period of dealing with ideas. Whilst driving I noticed, in a suburban yard, a snowman with leaves messily sticking out here and there; the figure had evidently been made from snow that had fallen over an unraked lawn. This image gave me the idea for flower-covered snowpeople.

The drawings, on paper, were exhibited in New York, Bruxelles, Naples, and Boston during 1994-95. Probably I made twenty-five in all. As they were popular works--they proved to be not only visually rewarding but, as intended, emotionally resonant--I decided to look for a way to share them with more people. At the same time, I sought a means of making them that would give me greater control over the work process. (The drawings were easy to "blow." Dozens of hours could go into just one and it might still veer off course and have to be destroyed.)

Adobe Photoshop was the answer. Photoshop gave me control over every single flower on the snowman's body. I could change the color, the saturation, the perspective, where a particular flower worked best on the body, etc. Each flower is an individual photo--either taken by me or scanned from a book. That image is then "dumbed down"--simplified, so that it doesn't appear to be too photographic or overly detailed. These creatures are creatures of the imagination, not of life.

Work began on the Flowered Snowman print series in 2000. Completing them has taken six years--to figure out how to make them, what they should look like in this digitalized state, and to do the actual (endless) work involved. A single figure might be built from a hundred different layers, with each layer requiring its own color balancing, etc.

Six years of work! A good thing too, as it turned out, because it gave the printing technology time to evolve. By the time I was ready to print the six images built over as many years, the digital print had arrived at the desired balance of photographic exactitude and archival quality. It finally made sense to work digitally, in other words.

The Flowered Snowmen appear to be for children, but the emotional location they speak to is really for adults. You have to have lived a bit--emotionally and psychologically--to pick up on the experience of life that a Flowered Snowman represents.

David Robbins