Daina Higgins, "Blackbook I"

Daina Higgins

Blackbook I

Archival pigment print on Sunset Cotton Etching Paper

Price range: $500 through $900

Blackbook I is made from a trompe l’oeil painting of Daina Higgins’s graffiti blackbook from the 1990s. A blackbook is a black-covered sketchbook that graffiti artists use to sketch and practice their tags and pieces — used in landscape format to mimic walls and other surfaces, its dark cover concealing what the artist is drawing.

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Year
2014
Edition of
50
Dimensions
27 x 20 inches
Authentication

Signed, numbered, and dated on the front by the artist. All Haystack editions come with a Certificate of Authenticity.

“I carried my blackbook and a set of pencils with me everywhere as a socially awkward teenager in Ohio. At parties I sat on the couch and buried my face in the sketchbook. ”

– Daina Higgins

About the Artwork

Blackbook I is made from a trompe l’oeil painting of Daina Higgins’s graffiti blackbook from the 1990s. A blackbook is a black-covered sketchbook that graffiti artists use to sketch and practice their tags and pieces — used in landscape format to mimic walls and other surfaces, its dark cover concealing what the artist is drawing.

Produced in collaboration with the artist and Forth Estate at Axelle Editions — a renowned printmaking studio active from 2005 to 2015 — Blackbook I is an archival pigment print, digitally printed using a lab-calibrated inkjet with pigment-based inks on 100% cotton paper. The smooth texture and purest natural white tone of the paper allow every visual subtlety and tonal transition in the original painting to be reproduced at the highest quality.

Curator's Note

Blackbook I shows two pages open-faced. The top page reveals the bleed-through of a Pilot marker tag by Orse (RIP), a legendary figure in Columbus’s graffiti scene, whose work on the city’s walls, freight trains and surfaces throughout the 1980s and 1990s helped define an era of urban mark-making in the American Midwest. The bottom page is a sketch of a piece Higgins painted on the Ohio Furniture rooftop in downtown Columbus in 1998 — partially, she is told, still there.

Executed in the trompe l’oeil style — French for “deceives the eye” — the print has the appearance of an opened sketchbook, with great care taken to depict the layers of marker within. Higgins flexes highly technical painting skills and mark-making, with near-photographic depictions of pocket-sized graffiti, thoughts and coded messages. Together, these two pages form a quiet document of a Columbus that existed largely out of sight — vivid, coded and very much alive.

About the Artist

Daina Higgins (b.1979, Columbus, OH) is an urban landscape painter and graffiti artist working in oil and water-based media. Her subject is the vernacular American landscape; depicting the built environment illuminated by natural and artificial light.

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