"Plants and Insects" is a two-volume set of soft covered books with hand-sewn binding and fourteen hand colored woodcuts. The short text is from Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima, a Nobel Prize winner.

In Spring Snow, Mishima was lamenting the change in Japan’s love of nature as part of its cultural identity. I had read the novel when it was first published over fifteen years ago. Upon re-reading it, I remembered the passages selected for "Plants and Insects". The words under the prints are from these passages and act as titles.

This book is my homage to the fine graphic artists of the Edo period. The covers are soft for this reason, the images large for the page, and the style of the wrap-around binding prevalent. I used every type of woodcutting technique available including a power tool. Colored mica is still available and included on some images.

Because each print is hand colored, they are not the same. To add to the playfulness, I took a graphite stick and rubbed the woodblock on the verso page to produce a reversal of the print. These rubbings are very close to drawings. I cut almost all the wood blocks sitting by tide pools, those wondrous places where plants and insects change identity before your eyes.