The fascination with monotype and monoprint never diminishes, thanks to the primal thrill of making a mark, combined with suspense and surprise as paper is lifted from a press. Recent prints from more than 70 top artists across the US demonstrate what monotypes and monoprints offer to artists and the broader world of art, while Kernan, a professional printmaker, provides a view from the studio. She explains the processes and motivations for making singular prints, as well as current practice and context. Examples include unique prints and variations that cross boundaries with combinations of collage, collagraph, direct and transfer drawing, painting, photosensitive plates, digital printing, and paper casting with stencils. With their backgrounds in curating, collecting, and art history, Laura G. Einstein draws us into the history and traditions of the forms, and Janice Oresman writes as a collector about the fascination of monotype as a magically spontaneous process.

Denton Welch (1915-48) died at the age of thirty-three after a brief but brilliant career as a writer and painter. The revealing, poignant, impressionistic voice that buoys his novels was much praised by critics and literati in England and has since inspired creative artists from William S. Burroughs to John Waters. His achievements were all the more remarkable because he suffered from debilitating spinal and pelvic injuries incurred in a bicycle accident at age eighteen. Though German bombs were ravaging Britain, Welch wrote in his published work about the idyllic landscapes and local people he observed in Kent. There, in 1943, he met and fell in love with Eric Oliver, a handsome, intelligent, but rather insecure "landboy"--an agricultural worker with the wartime Land Army. Oliver would become a companion, comrade, lover, and caretaker during the last six years of Welch's life. All fifty-one letters that Welch wrote to Oliver are collected and annotated here for the first time. They offer a historical record of life amidst the hardship, deprivation, and fear of World War II, and also are a timeless testament of one young man's tender and intimate emotions, his immense courage in adversity, and his continual struggle for love and creative existence.

The book "Growing the Fantastic Garden 2013" explains the process and depicts images of making a collaborative woodcut print by 92 international artists.

The resulting four-panel print measures 60 x 44 inches and encompasses a large garden image composed of 92 puzzle-like pieces, each unique as the artist who design it.

Briefly, a Monumental Puzzle Print is a large design composed of "puzzle pieces," each of which is designed and carved as a relief or woodcut by a unique artist under a common theme.

Woodcut prints are made by carving a block of wood in relief, inking the relief (such as a stamp) and applying paper and pressure to obtain an imprint of the carving.

In this fourth collaborative woodcut print, the project director, Maria Arango Diener designed and sawed a wood block into puzzle-like pieces, then sent the pieces to participant artists; they carved their own little design under the theme Fantastic Garden and sent the puzzle piece back to the director.

The Master Gardener and Project Director proceeded to assemble the carved puzzle pieces. The entire design was inked and printed as a woodcut print after the puzzle was reassembled and finally each participant received a huge print encompassing the entire design.

The book "Growing the Fantastic Garden 2013" contains all the individual images with artist names and locations, the composite panels, studio pictures and explanation of the woodcut print process as well as notes on the collaboration process, information on the design and brief history of previous projects, artist's comments on their own images, individual block and print photos of each artist's contribution, gardening quotes and the birth of the garden among the dog trails and much more.

The author and artist project director, Maria Arango Diener has led four such projects and is already planning the next.