"The Storyteller's Circle" is my first new woodcut for 2013. Before the recorded word, cultures transmitted their hard-won wisdom and worldviews through spoken stories. The oral tradition enables people to modify their stories as appropriate to fit evolving situations. They have the potential of handing down guidelines with modification. Spoken stories are adaptable, and they tend to promote adaptable (and adapted) lifeways.
On the other hand, modern, industrial cultures (with industrially recorded and transmitted information), endeavor to preserve stories, whether they are currently appropriate or not. Recorded stories are institutionally efficient methods of instilling dogma and the others lies and truths we live by.
Recorded stories for better or worse, are extinction-resistant; oral stories are extinction-prone-- as the storytellers grow old.
Each print in the edition of 88 (printed with my 1913 industrially efficient letterpress) is 8" x 5.5" (matted 14" x 12") and currently sells for $48.
"The Storyteller's Circle," a woodcut by Fred Montague. © 2013
