Goya’s Ghosts

Goya’s Ghosts is a portfolio of 16 multi-media images by Bob Erickson and Eric Rohmann. Bob lives in the Adirondack Park in upstate New York and Eric lives in Oak Park, Illinois. Each artist responded to the verso images of Francisco Goya’s Sketchbook Cuaderno C.

Goya’s images were digitally printed in their original size on photographic paper. Bob and Eric’s final images were adhered to 15” x 19” Rives BFK paper. Additional text pages were printed on Asuka digital paper.

Discoveries can arise from the most unexpected places. On a visit to the Prado Museum in the spring of 2023, after a day of wandering its glories, Eric and I stopped into the gift shop. There, among the bright silk scarves and artist-inspired jewelry I found an unremarkable looking book with an ordinary gray cloth cover: Cuarderno C, Francisco de Goya.  I opened it. Inside, the book was anything but plain. It was Goya’s third sketchbook, reproduced by the museum in its actual size. Eric and I were delighted.  But what we found most surprising was that all the pages of the sketchbook had been reprinted -- both front and back sides. As Goya drew on the thin sketchbook paper, his watery ink often bled through to the back creating "ghost Goyas.” While many of these reversed images looked like pale shadows of the drawings, other pages—where Goya drew with heavier application of ink— resulted in more abstracted images. 

“We need to do something with these,” I said. At home, I scanned the back sides of 24 randomly chosen sketchbook pages and printed them onto matte photo paper. We then divided the images between us and got to work.  There were no limitations on technique or materials.  Our only goal was to make pictures in response to what we saw in Goya’s “ghost” images. The act of making the pictures seen in this portfolio is our attempt to summon and collaborate with an artist we know so well, but now see in an unexpected new light.