Nathan's Marauder

When you ride a train back to your hometown, you look out across the vast scenery - into a sky that seems to stand still in its endless blue while the trees and the scattered towns and the telephone wires rush by like a movie reel. In the middle of the country, far away from the bustling city and the boiling traffic is a plain white house with one giant tree and one tiny swing in the yard. The house looks empty and the only car there is a broken-down and rusty one but the swing is swaying in the breeze. And as you pass that yard and the swing and come upon row after row of subdivided neighborhoods with houses that all look exactly the same with the same car in each drive-way and their drivers all leaving at the same time going to virtually the same place - you are still being haunted by that swing. When I look at Justin Santora's work, I not only see that swing, but I see the child that once swayed in it. Justin's prints and illustrations are complex in process and thought but simple in beauty. The ideas of innocence and theScreen printing is a printing technique that uses a woven mesh to support an ink-blocking stencil. The attached stencil forms open areas of mesh that transfer ink or other printable materials which can be pressed through the mesh as a sharp-edged image onto a substrate. A roller or squeegee is moved across the screen stencil, forcing or pumping ink past the threads of the woven mesh in the open areas. Screen printing is also a stencil method of print making in which a design is imposed on a screen of silk or other fine mesh, with blank areas coated with an impermeable substance, and ink is forced through the mesh onto the printing surface. It is also known as silkscreen, seriography, and serigraph.