Fine Art, Print, Charles Luce, Suit Trap, Limited Edition Screenprint, 1984

Charles B. Luce (born 1947)
Suit Trap
American: 1984
Screen print and ink on chiri by John Nichols, ed. 31/50
Stamped left margin with artist’s name, monogram and date, and right margin with edition number
38 × 25.5 inches
$1,350

Colorful print of a man’s suit jacket, a poetic symbolic portrait of the artist’s grandfather that juxtaposes flat shapes and text against a sheet of chiri, a textural Japanese paper with subtly varied coloration and random dark specks. The main portion of the composition is a man’s suit jacket overlaid with a black line drawing of a face. The jacket overlaps a black rectangle with a white sinuous line resembling a thread that leads from a spool upper left to a beetle upper right. Some of the shapes are labeled with block letters that playfully name objects that the shapes resemble: California (as seen on a map), Moon, Cliff, Rabbit, Fish, Fog, and Oar. The right half of the jacket is bright yellow with pictographic pale gray shapes arranged on top, with stylized eyes. In each margin above and below the jacket are five small suit jackets apparently copied from vintage catalogs and rendered in two colors each, which also are labeled with words that are explained in two rows of small text at the top:

Various spirits (some sighted) captured within a variety of suited traps.
Or, Grandfather’s jacket smelled of tobacco, varnish, and sweat. (For HWB)

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