“As a Hen Gathers Her Chicks... (Matthew 23:37)” recent color etching.
The process of making this print became a huge blessing for me as I worked on it off and on for the past couple months. The inspiration for this print came from a scripture passage my friend Michaela shared with me earlier this summer in reference to a story about St. Thérèse. Apparently, when St. Thérèse was a child there was a small instance in which she happened to find a hen gathering her chicks along a path. This little encounter made her sob almost immediately, as she remembered the words of Jesus to Jerusalem: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how many times I yearned to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her young under her wings, but you were unwilling!” I think little Thérèse had one of those moments of beauty that sometimes leads us to heartache, and a deeper understanding of the truth of who we are, and who we are called to be, as God’s children.
So, after meditating with this story and scripture, I asked my friend Mary Ann if I could draw her chickens and went to work on sketches for the print. I used soft ground techniques, aquatint, and salt texture on the zinc plate and printed these by hand with the a la poupée color technique. I also experimented with chine collé on the warmer brown prints shown.
