This collaborative limited boxed edition by Ken Price and Harvey Mudd, was donated to Peat and Repeat to help us with our fund-raising initiative.

Ken Price and Harvey Mudd

The Plain of Smokes: A Poem Cycle

Santa Barbara: Arabesque Books, 1981. Limited Edition; number 135 of 150 copies. SIGNED to colophon by both artist and author.

Featuring twenty original silkscreen prints Ken Price created to illustrate a 76-page poem cycle by Harvey Mudd

Published by Arabesque Books in 1981, The Plain of Smokes is a collaborative ode to Los Angeles. A poem cycle by Harvey Mudd brilliantly illustrated by Ken Price that shaped both the artist and the poet. The process, which began in 1978, of conceptualizing, developing, and creating The Plain of Smokes, has been described by many, including its author, as the true definition of the word “collaboration.” Mudd and Price continually worked together in revising each other’s work, resulting in a visualization of the dialogue between two artists.

Arabesque Books asked Gary Lichtenstein of SOMA Fine Art Press in San Francisco to print Price’s multilayered paintings featuring pencil, gouache, watercolour, and India ink for the book. In order to translate every last nuance of colour relationship and texture from the original work into printer’s ink, Lichtenstein deconstructed Price’s work layer by layer. The most complicated image in the series, “Club Zebra,” required 28 colour separations and nearly 5,000 passes through the hand press to print 186 copies. The prints’ “painterly” qualities are a stunning testament to Lichtenstein’s mastery.

With 19 loose folio gatherings of text (76 pages), accompanied by 20 original serigraphs — nine in color — designed by Price and printed by Gary Lichtenstein (15.5 x 12 inch sheets); each serigraph has three respective blind-stamps of artist, publisher, and printer. Two of the prints are signed, dated and hand-numbered in pencil by Price. Publisher's pamphlet also laid-in loose. Contents laid into a clamshell case fully encased by a Los Angeles map, housed within an orange cloth slipcase with printed label to front panel.

Ken Price (1935-2012) emerged in the 1960s with a group of Los Angeles-based “surfer artists” that included, among others, Ed Ruscha, Robert Irwin, and Larry Bell. Price is known principally as a ceramicist yet throughout his career he commanded a unique position between sculpture and painting. An artist who is celebrated for challenging conventional ideals and definitions, Price was a technical master of form, color, and surface.

Harvey Mudd (1940) is a writer, painter, and photographer. His first of four books of poetry was published in 1976, and the third, The Plain of Smokes, was short-listed for the Los Angeles Times Poetry Prize. New Mexico was Mudd’s primary home for roughly 20 years and it was there that he met Ken Price.

Price: $9,800.00

All proceeds from this sale go to Peat and Repeat’s operating costs.