about this series:

This series of etchings is inspired by the work of the artist Dick Swift and readings from the Desert Fathers. Swift is one of the few printmakers to employ more representational imagery with the color viscosity printing technique. The very nature of the technique makes representation somewhat difficult as some degree of abstraction is inevitable.

While reading a portion of the Desert Fathers (4th century hermits who lived in the Egyptian desert) the artist was taken by the concept that we are each called to find the face of Christ in everyone we meet. The message in a story about one particular monk revealed the ideal that, whether they are good or bad, we should treat everyone with the dignity and respect with which we would treat Jesus.

The ongoing series is conceived as twenty-five pairs of portraits. There will be twenty-five images of Jesus drawn from art historical sources, paired with some of the best and worst figures from human history--with everything in between. The black and white sample shows the initial image as composed in Photoshop from the text from the Desert Fathers, then transferred to a copper plate and developed with more traditional etching techniques (see video of the process below).