Visually, the two prints occupy a space between Blade’s luminous, intuitive paintings, and the structured linework of her drawings. In her practice Blade approaches painting as a durational and intuitive process. She revisits figures and landscapes over time, allowing meaning to develop through repetition and reflection. Using a wet-on-wet technique with acrylic and ink on cotton poplin, she creates translucent surfaces where figuration and abstraction coexist. Figures emerge and recede within these spaces, integrated with their surroundings and representing universal states rather than individual likenesses. Their gestures convey moments of transition, vulnerability, and resilience. The imagery in these print editions present the convergence and diversion of paths, routes, and ways, and offer an open reading of the multitudinous stories held within these sites of journey.

There is a curious aspect of mirroring in intaglio printmaking, in which images are reversed from the plate or substrate to the paper. There are instances in Michelle’s work that suggest upside-down realms; glassy pools that accept plunging bodies, trees that shine radiance up into translucent wispy night skies, boulders that emanate light and heat as though they were still forming. The play between scales of interior and exterior worlds is important in her work, offering an impression that the volumes above us are also below, and that the energies contained within all things can radiate outward. Prisms, mirrors, reflecting pools, paths that invert. We attempt to translate flickers of light and gusts of wind into something permanent and tangible, to make concrete that which is liquid; fixing images of memories or desires that haven’t yet been embodied or experienced. 

As publishers, this project has a personal significance. The originating image of horse and rider reminds us of the Arroyo Seco canyons and our foothill community, specifically the historic equestrian area of West Altadena that was heavily affected by the Eaton Fire in January 2025. The drypoint print represents a path turned fluid, perhaps transformed through winter rains, which we had so desperately needed before the fire. These differences between a path and a watercourse bring up thoughts around permanence or temporality, intention, methods of construction or development, and shifts between the human-made and the natural. The watercourse can stir many connotations; a washing or floating away of something once deemed solid; maundering; being moved by an external flow; surrender - whether blissful or not. As inhabitants of this shared space, there is always an importance in being open to a path that can change directions or form, with or without our control. As Michelle’s titles suggest, we are in a constant state of duality, coming and going - both Within the Timeless, and at The Crossing Place.