Tim Michel became interested in deltas after a friend, a follower of Carl Jung, suggested it would be useful to have a personal symbol or archetype that could carry you to the next stage of your life. “This was interesting to me,” says Michel, whose “Delta” show at Chroma Projects considers these alluvial phenomena through a series of prints.
“I had no idea what that might be,” he says. “But over time, it evolved into the delta.” He went online and looked at the earth’s great deltas. “To realize that all over the world there are these rivers all feeding into the sea resonated with me, so I began to draw them.”
Deltas are formed when a river encounters a body of water where there’s resistance in the form of tides or waves. As the river slows, sediment is deposited and the water diverges into a fan shape. This creates diverse and ecologically important ecosystems. A delta’s sediment-rich, fertile soil, and abundance of naturally filtered water make it a magnet for all sorts of species, including humans who’ve developed them into thriving agricultural centers around the planet.
“This idea of transition from one state of order to another, felt very good to me,” says Michel. The Greek letter delta, ∆, which means change, derives from an earlier Phoenician letter, dalet, meaning door. The letter was absorbed into the Greek alphabet where it became triangular, inspired by the shape of the Nile River delta.
Michel began immersing himself in creating deltas, looking at them in different ways, and typically depicting them at night, often with comets and sometimes stars. “I use celestial imagery a lot, I find it very important,” he says. In some cases, he uses these astronomical objects as a visual device to take you out of the plane of the delta and pull your eye upwards. In one print, a delicate Big Dipper points to the North Star above the delta in a confluence of meaning about the flow and direction of life.
In most of Michel’s work, the viewer has a bird’s-eye view, rendered with traditional perspective. Sometimes the river snakes toward you and sometimes it flows away. The first piece in the show, an etching, depicts a river coming toward you from the direction of a mountain range. In the foreground the delta splits into its network of distributaries. In the upper right, a comet, with a prodigious tail, barrels toward earth. It’s a simple image, but it has a curious power. Michel brackets the landscape with a lemon sky and emerald sea, which he muddies with etching marks that bloom across their surfaces. He edges the mountains that evoke the Blue Ridge with a thick white line highlighting the jagged ridge.
In two works—the eighth one and the final one in the show—the artist abandons his marks for a hard-edged, graphic effect and perspective shift. Using a laser cutter to produce plates, the images are reduced to sharply delineated shapes of color—and while the subject matter isn’t obvious, the elegance of form is. Michel finds that the printing plates hold their own beauty, and displays them alongside the work.
“Delta #1” and “CP” are made from the same plate. Michel changed the ink, shifting the cool energy of the expected blue sky color to something more arresting in the orangey pink. “I used the same plate, but I did it in two colors—you can’t do that with a painting,” he says. “The two prints are very different and they feel very different.” He did the same thing with the fourth and 10th prints, and here again, the same image with different colored inks creates a completely different effect.
“I treat every print as a monoprint where the variations in the inks, plate preparation, wiping, and press pressure combine to make a unique, one-of-a-kind impression on each piece of paper,” says Michel, who appreciates the roles serendipity and chance play in printmaking. “When you print, you don’t really know what’s going to happen because your partner is the press,” Michel says. “Sometimes it can be a good partner and sometimes it can be a bad one … you have to always be thinking ahead.”
It’s worth getting up close to Michel’s prints to examine his marks. These range from pinpricks to more animated flicks and lines. In some, he inserts funny little images that have symbolic importance for him: stars, fish, comets, spirals. In one, there’s actually a little settlement. You can make out a church steeple, a temple-like structure, and other buildings.
“A delta represents the completion of the journey a river takes,” says Michel. “I had to keep doing deltas because I was learning from it. I was learning something about myself and now I’m learning something about the world, and where I’ve been in the world, and where I am in my life, all those things fit with what the delta represents for me.”
Tim Michel’s “Delta” is on exhibition at Chroma Projects micro gallery Inside Vault Virginia through August 29. More information at chromaprojects.com. Supplied photo.
