In addition to landscapes and especially seascapes, you may have noticed an unusual number of night scenes. I can’t say why I like them so much, but there you go. Another Japanese print from the Shin-Hanga period (modern revival of ukiyo-e, classic Japanese woodcuts) by Koitsu, a print of whose I showed back in week 1! And it was also a night scene, though a moonlit one. Today’s print is a night scene without the moon showing, either directly or by reflection. The only light visible in the print is reflection from the city and from a boat on the water. An atmospheric piece, with colors attenuated by the darkness, but oh so lovely.
Midnight Scene at Atami (Tsuchiya Koitsu, 1935, woodcut)
Amrin Landeck’s style might be classified in the same general family as the styles of Martin Lewis and Stow Wengenroth. Like those printmakers, his scenes are full of painstaking detail, yet the textures are different. Take a look at today’s print, “Approaching Storm, Manhattan”. The storm clouds not only have varying density of blackness, but the underlying texture is of many very fine lines. The brickwork on the tallest chimney is exquisitely detailed. The technique used was drypoint, a form of engraving using a very fine stylus, and generating abundant texture because the feathery copper residue displaced by the stylus remained attached to the side of the incision made by the stylus. This residue wears off quickly with multiple impressions, such that drypoint prints are often produced in very small editions, and differences between early and late impressions can often be quite notable. I am displaying an early and a late impression of this print, and you can see quite a different in the fine texture of both the storm clouds and the brickwork of the chimney.
My wife suggested it might be helpful for my readers to have a short explanation of what the different kinds of prints are. There are 4 basic modes of making prints: relief, intaglio, planographic, and screen printing. What’s the difference? For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume you’re printing with black ink on white paper.
Relief printing (aka letterpress) means you remove the surface of your plate wherever you don’t want ink (or do want white space). This is typically a block of wood, or linoleum attached to a wood block. The ink is applied to those raised surfaces which will make the black lines of the picture with a roller. Think of a rubber stamp and you’ll be in the right ballpark.
Intaglio means you remove the surface of your plate where you DO want ink. Typically, a metal plate is used, and lines are incised into the plate where ink is desired, either with a sharp tool (engraving) or with acid (etching–in this case the plate is first evenly coated with wax, and then the picture is “drawn” with a sharp object removing the wax, and the plate is soaked in acid. The wax protects the rest of the plate so only the “drawn” areas are etched by the acid. The acid is washed off and the wax is then removed.) Ink is applied with a roller, and then ink on the smooth surface of the plate is removed by wiping the plate gently, leaving ink ONLY in the indentations where lines were created. (Intaglio is Italian for incised.)
Planographic printing, aka lithography, involves “drawing” a picture on the flat plate (typically a block of limestone that has been made very smooth) with a wax crayon that attracts ink. The surface is then flooded with ink, and ink is wiped away leaving ink retained on top of the crayoned pattern. (Litho=greek root for stone.)
In each of these three methods, paper is then applied to the plate and pressed hard against to create the image.
Screen printing involves use of a stencil (screen) with the picture drawn into it as a pattern blocking ink from passing through in the desired white spaces directly onto the paper.
I hope this is helpful–feel free to post questions!
As you may remember, Grandville was a 19th century French artist who published a lot of prints poking fun a the Parisian middle class by putting animal heads on the figures of human bodies. This allowed him to satirize without being close enough to be accused of libel. He published a book full of these called Les Metamorphoses du Jour The prints are black-and-white lithographs which were hand-colored after printing in the first edition; it was so popular that there were several subsequent editions which were illustrated with woodcut reproductions by secondary artists.
As I was scanning through the prints included in Les Metamorphoses du Jour, this one jumped out at me and made me laugh. I don’t know the terms in French, but in English I think this might qualify as a pun on “fishwives” (wives or mothers of fishermen, stereotypically loud and given to strong language). Enjoy!
Les metamorphoses du jour (Lithograph, hand colored after printing, 1829)
The print artists I most enjoy (Martin Lewis, Stow Wengenroth) create incredibly detailed pictures–with every line carefully drawn on the plate, whether etched, engraved or “lithographed”. I recently came across a printmaker whose approach is Impressionist–dabs and splotches in many cases as opposed to precise lines. Even when lines are used, they are often incomplete, suggesting rather than demonstrating the structure. I don’t think I enjoy this style as much as Wengenroth and Lewis’s technique but I do like it.
Maurice de Vlaminck (1875-1958) was a French artist best known as a painter and one of the creators of Fauvism. As a painter, his style definitely included much of what we think of as Impressionist, and I guess I would say the same about this print style. He favored lithography, though he also did etching and engraving. The print I’ve selected for today portrays a street in a small French village and the surrounding countryside.
Nelle-la-Vallee, le Chemin aux Bords du Sausseron (1926, lithograph)
Grafton Tyler Brown (1841-1918) had a fascinating life. He was the first African-American professional artist known in California. He had a varied career, working as a mapmaker, a commercial artist with his own business, a draftsman for US Army Corps of Engineers, and at times when his finances permitted, he devoted himself to fine arts. He was both a printmaker and a painter. He has done numerous absolutely gorgeous paintings of the American West, Pacific Northwest, and even into Canada (having lived in Victoria, BC for a while). Most of his paintings are landscapes, a large number of which involve water.
Today I have chosen a lovely look down the Columbia RIver (which divides Washington from Oregon) at Mitchell Point on the Oregon side, east of Portland near Mount Hood.
Mitchell Point looking down the Columbia River (oil painting, 1887)
I am incredibly grateful for having discovered this passion for art. Of all the artists whose work I enjoy (and the list keeps growing, a little overwhelmingly!), none evokes that gratitude more than Stow Wengenroth. Born and raised in Brooklyn, living in Long Island for many years, he moved to Rockport (one of the most beautiful places I know) 4 years before his death in 1978. Today’s print, Moonlight, shows two boats grounded at nighttime low tide in the harbor at Rockport. Look at the quality of the moonlight–it’s a glow! Look at the shadow cast by the boat in the foreground. Simple and so beautiful!
I appreciate Escher’s intellectually interesting impossible art, but for the purposes of this sharing project, I am focused on prints that are appealing more at a visual/visceral than a cognitive level. I last shared his Dewdrop.
Today’s print is entitled Rippled Surface, and it’s not especially complex, just beautiful.
Katsushita Hokusai (1760-1849) is perhaps the best known Japanese printmaker in history thus far. Much of his fame comes from the iconic print Great Wave off Kanagawa, which is part of a well-known series of prints entitled Thirty-six views of Mount Fuji (though in fact, the series contains 46 prints), which were intensely popular during the artist’s lifetime and remain so. Mount Fuji was a landmark of great importance, and many artists include Fuji in visual works.
Today’s print is entitled “A view of Mount Fuji across Lake Suwa in Shinano province”. Not only is this print beautiful, but it illustrates some interesting aspects of the production of traditional ukiyo-e woodcut print art. Most commonly, the artist would create an original drawing of the scene on thin paper. The drawing would be glued to a block of wood, and a separate artisan (the woodcarver) would carve out the pattern in the woodblock, destroying the drawing in the process, of course. Then the woodblock would be turned over to a printer for production. For color prints, several woodblocks would be carved, one corresponding to each color in the picture, and they would be printed serially onto individual pieces of paper.
It was pretty common for printmakers to start with a simple color scheme and see how the public liked the picture. If it was popular, they might carve additional blocks to add more colors (and usually had to further carve the original blocks to accomodate the added colors.) This print began life with a mostly blue color scheme, but as it was quite popular, Hokusai reworked it to incorporate a broader palette.
As if that wasn’t complicated enough, often after many printings and/or many years, woodblocks would degrade or break. When that occurred, if additional impressions were desired, someone (often not the original artist) would carve a new block to match the originals.
I am presenting two versions of this print–one printed in 1830 from the original blocks (among the earliest editions, albeit after the color palette had been broadened), and a reproduction (new block carved and printed in 1930, with a fairly different color scheme.) In addition to the differences in the color scheme, the older print seems (to my eye) to show finer details.
A view of Mount Fuji across Lake Suwa in Shinano province (1830) (1930)
Martin Lewis, the printmaker who got me started on this enthusiasm, did a lot of interesting things with shadows. I think his many nocturnal scenes set in NYC are really his best work. Today’s print is focused on shadows as the sun is going down in midtown Manhattan. (This scene is apparently set at 34th St and Park Avenue, looking west.)
Lewis employs an interesting combination technique in this print: he creates background texture via an etching (acid) technique called sandpaper ground, but the picture is created by an engraving (sharp stylus) technique called drypoint. I’ll share more of Lewis’ shadow prints in the future.
