Hello Friends,

You may recall that in April of 2025 Nina Rossi and I got married. Such a wonderful event and now we live in marital bliss! Our honeymoon began with a week in Amsterdam and then we flew to Venice for a week in what I consider to be the most beautiful city on earth. 

The Grand Canal, gondolas, the Rialto Bridge, Piazza San Marco.... the list of iconic places is long for such a small city. Thousands of artists have painted and drawn more thousands of images over the course of hundreds of years. Venice has been immortalized many times. But Venice is more than the iconic images and crowds of tourists and I wanted to find a quieter scene that captures what it's like to walk around the rabbit warren of alleys and canals.

Above is one of three linoleum blocks being carved to make the print. This composition is a bit of a composite of several photographs I took. Laundry day appears to be on Sundays and I loved the inclusion of a line of drying clothes that included the Gondolieri striped shirts (which don't really appear in the print until the final impression). As always, the print evolved over the course of multiple impressions. Here are the impressions used to compile the image.

The final impression pulls everything together:

"Laundry Day, Venice", linocut print, 12" x 9" (31 x 23.5)

Here are a couple of details of the final print:

And so, this is my souvenir of one of the most special visits I've ever had. The print was very complicated. But I guess they all are, really. If you would like to take a look at more about the process of making these prints, I've put together another blog post about that which you might enjoy. For now this is completed and I'm on to the next print already. Thanks for joining me in the creation of "Laundry Day, Venice." I hope I'll hear from you soon. Let me know if you find yourself in Western Massachusetts and would like to visit my studio. It's always good to hear from you.

William H. Hays