Top: Hanka, Brook Trout II, A.P., 1995, etching, image size:4 3/4" x 7 1/4", frame size: 12 3/4" x 15 5/8"
Bottom: Brook Trout IX, 1995, hand colored etching, image size: 7 1/2" x 9 1/2", frame size: 15 3/4" x 19 5/8"

Million Dollar Oak

This magnificent Burr Oak grows in a prairie opening of Southwest
Michigan which has today become a suburb of Kalamazoo. This original portaging place from
the St Joseph to the Kalamazoo River watersheds conferred a meaningful place-name to Portage.
Until recently the landscape was agricultural and dotted with large Victorian farmhouses
speaking of successful farmers tilling the deep prairie soils, but now it is a place that grows tract
housing and mini-malls. The tree however still thrives; its limbs reaching out and sweeping to the
ground in the signature gesture of an open-grown patriarch. It's been standing here long before
there was an incorporated entity of Portage, before Titus Bronson's arrival in the Kalamazoo
River Valley, long before there was even a land office in White Pigeon opening up the territory
for settlement ? selling what it didn't own. The Bur Oak was once known as the Redwood of the
prairies because it survives wild-fire and the native American custom of managing prairies for
grazing by periodically burning them. This tree is a living bridge to the civilization preceding
ours and thus very rare.
I have occasionally stopped to admire and draw this tree. Some years ago I noticed a curious mix
of historic buildings being relocated to the nearby farm as they were being displaced by shopping
malls and housing. An hydro-geology firm set up shop in one of the relocated buildings and the
original farmhouse became an office for the nature conservancy. Then I heard that the owner had
been offered a million dollars by Walgreens Corporation, but that preferring the company of the
big tree, he'd turned them down. We slip so easily into believing that there are no altruistic
gestures or selfless people. We don't always know the good they do, but they are here among us,
quietly active in our own community.

Ladislav Hanka 2005

Toad Text from the folio of etchings

Toads

Wet meadows were once alive with Leopard Frogs and sandy uplands with toads. Children learned to interact with them because they were plentiful and easy to catch. Their naked, clawless and toothless bodies are evocative of our own, as they struggle to escape the child trying to hold on. Bull Frogs scream like babies when caught. You let go immediately in a timeless reflex - anything to stop the crying. To a kid wanting to catch the large Bass lurking under a dock, frogs are natural bait, but who could hook a frog through the lips again having once witnessed the little hands clawing the hook, trying to get free. For those who’ve passed through biology classes, there was the trauma of pithing and vivisections. They are too much like us to bear hurting them, yet we allow them to silently die from environmental conditions that are within our control.

These etchings depicting American Toads (Bufo americanus) have their origins in those emotion-laden experiences of youth. They began as field sketches at a time when amphibians were once again commanding my attention as an adult, appearing in my dreams, in my reading and auspiciously on footpaths where I couldn’t ignore their presence. This kept recurring until I realized that I needed to honour their presence and commit their images to copper, ink, and paper. Wanting to return to the source and work from life, I experienced the global decline of amphibians directly - not just reading about changes in distant rain forest ecology, but here where I live. At the source of the world's largest supply of fresh water, between the Great Lakes, I encountered difficulties catching the few frogs and toads I needed for study. The chorus of frog song we think an ordinary background of a summer’s evening, is today composed of far fewer individuals than before. The decline in amphibian populations has been precipitous. Salamanders are becoming scarce. Toads are much reduced and the Hog Nosed Snakes that eat them are nearly gone. Like the diminished number of the returning migratory song birds - the disappearing amphibians are easily overlooked - many still remain. The woods and wetlands are just a little quieter with each spring.

For me, the most foreboding omen at the turn of tho miIlennium was not the faulty computer code Y2K, which mere1y cost industry some money, but the deformed frogs appearing throughout northern latitudes - Green Frogs tlying to jump with twisted or missing limbs - the grotesque disjointed swimming movements of Pickerel Frogs with extra legs protruding from unlikely places. I encountered them in the same places I was finding malformed fungi. These mutated mushrooms, had adhesions on their surfaces resembling inverted caps with gills facing up. I'd only seen this in Europe, immediately after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Mushrooms concentrate heavy metals and radiation. I cannot help but see a connection.

Diminishing amphibian populations are another warning sign among many - another asphyxiating canary, in yet another cage in one more mine. The vitality of our enviroment is waning as environmentally caused diseases increase -and our fellow creatures wink out from one pond or woodlot to another - until genetIc flow no longer
connects these increasingly separated populations. Eventually they weaken and with a hard winter or unusual drought, disappear. We assume they survive somewhere down on the farm or back in the swap, but the farm is under duress and the swamp too, is being drilled for oil or logged. How many Warnings does it take to see that everything with which we’ve evolved and which we are adapted to see as beautiful, is in trouble - that our lives too are on the line?

What will happen to folklore that assumes familiarity with nature, when the bugs, birds and frogs of this earth are no longer commonly encountered? Will children hearing the Wind In The Willows identify with Mr Toad and feel the same empathy for creatures that have become characters in TV documentaries rather than animals encountered when playing outside? Watching a snake slowly swallow a frog as it reaches out with human looking hands for twigs to gasp is a powerful experience that speaks volumes about being alive, sentient and hungry. This once-common experience transcends all simple didactic and moralistic messages with universal experience - communicating this unforgettable urgency.

When I sketch in the field, it’s not with a viewer in mind. I draw what attracts my attention, filling sketchbooks with what the hand can get down before the subject flees, the fingers get cold or concentration becomes distracted with biting insects. These studies, in their unaffected simplicity, are attractive and also worthy of exhibition. In this case, the field studies of toads evolved into my keeping a terrarium of toads to study. The drawings multiplied and became more composed. I scanned the images into a computer and made half-toned transparencies to etch through photo-emulsions into copper plates - preserving the perforations and wrinkles of pages torn from sketchbooks. The polymer doesn’t always adhere perfectly and thus the process is itself being recorded in the plates as they evolve and the simple drawings are enriched with the tonality and marks of the medium they are entering.

The field sketches are only subconsciously composed, but certainly could descend into affectation and counterfeit natural history. I believe though, that composing a sketchbook page is as legitimate as striving for spontaneity in studio work. Every gesture i life has potential to be a considered action, but also one that is in the moment. With sufficient consciousness, the difference between preparatory and finished work might disappear and the master, no longer questioning his own mark, would make an engraving with the same fluidity and clarity of purpose, as he would sketch a flying bird.

There is a grace in maintaining living relationships with toads and trees, of allowing them a place in the landscape we actually inhabit, just as there is grace in living in the present and accommodating current technology. I've enjoyed the exploration of digital media, making my own choices and not letting technology dictate the form or usurp what I have to say . There is a common denominator implied here in giving everything its due -- of putting up with insecurity and inconvenience, of accepting Poison Ivy and mosquitoes, of engaging unfamiliar technologies and suffering unproductive land in order to have meaningful relationships with the whole spectrum of the other, here and now.

The cover-piece js an etching made to elicit the appearance that this volume has been bound in toad skin. 'Skin of the toad ' is a lithographer's expression for a nicely executed tusche wash. Put down freshly, without becoming muddied from overwork, the wash will set up In a beautiful reticulated pattern reminiscent of toad skin. The paper is hand-made by Zdenek Krall in the Czech Republic.

Ladislav Hanka, in Kalamazoo. 2005