This is one of my favorite Martin Lewis prints. He does so well with the night scenes, especially in New York City. This one is set in Astoria, Queens–a neighborhood in which I lived while I was in grad school. The quality of the light, the shadows–and most of all the texture of the material of which the bridge is made. It all adds up to amazing atmosphere. The technique is drypoint, which as you may remember, is an engraving technique using a very fine stylus, which can produce very textured prints.
While I continue to focus on prints, I will continue to bring striking examples of other visual art as I encounter them–mostly 2-d as I’m not really a sculpture buff, but in this case including 3-d works.
Starting in the 1960s, in connection with the environmental movement, artists (primarily in the US at that point) started writing about the relationship of art to the earth–in terms of materials used, in terms of installations that were harmonious with their environment, etc. They started creating art in accordance with these principles.
A few months back, I came across the work of a British land artist named Andy Goldsworthy. He does occasional indoor works, but the bulk of his work is outdoor with purely found materials from nature. For these outdoor exhibits (which are by their nature ephemeral), he will often use only his body and “found tools” (e.g. rocks). He documents and preserves the ephemeral outdoor work via photography, which is how we have anything to look at here. Rock balancing is one of his techniques, and he has been called the founder of modern rock balancing.
Given that this genre may not be so familiar to many people, I have selected several pieces to show today, illustrating the range of techniques and kinds of sculptures he creates.
A couple of months ago, I shared a pandemic-themed print titled “Isolation” by a contemporary German print artist. I thought it was inspired–a perfect visual representation. The artist doesn’t have a enormous output so far, but a decent number of prints, some of which are to my taste and some of which are decidedly not.
There’s one little print which I like, though the visual is not as striking as many I post. The artist often posts his preliminary sketches along with the prints. The preliminary sketch appeals to me a lot more than the print itself. I ask myself why. The print has quite a lot of solid black, which to me feels almost the same as looking at something in low light, where you can’t appreciate as much of the detail (or color when applicable). Also, the solid black is lacking the detail that I love in these classic black-and-white prints. The preliminary sketch is much lighter overall, partly because shading with pencil is intrinsically not as dark as solid areas of black ink, but also because the pencil shading is much more textured. There are also solid black areas in the print in which the corresponding areas of the sketch are barely shaded, including the windows on the right. The cobblestones are also barely indicated in the sketch, leaving a lot less pencil shading corresponding to areas of black ink in the print.
I think I would rather own and hang the sketch instead of the print, if that were an option.
Shady Road (Linocut compared with prelimary graphite sketch, 2021)
I’ve been at this for ten whole weeks, and haven’t missed a day, which I find somewhat shocking. At what point do I stop counting and just keep going?
A week or so ago, I introduced a new (to this space) artist named Grietje Postma, who is a master of the intricate and complex technique of color reduction relief prints. Exploring the same gallery website a few days later, I discovered another artist who is also an incredible master of this same technique. (I presume that this is not accident–did one of them introduce the other to the gallery? Or does the gallery’s “curator” have a particular interest in this technique?) In the intervening week, I’ve been trying to familiarize myself with this new artist’s body of work, and background.
William Hays discovered painting as a teen, and his passion for art led him to formally study sculpture in Alaska. After graduating, he moved to Vermont, and for the next twenty years devoted himself to painting, mostly in oils. His wife suggested making his works more accessible by trying his hand at printmaking, which he quickly mastered and of which he became a passionate practitioner. Within five years, he had switched almost exclusively to printmaking. He carves his reduction prints in both linoleum and wood.
Hays creates landscapes exclusively. His style, even more than Postma’s, is a close to photorealistic style like Wengenroth’s, but in color. HIs choice of colors in most cases is much closer to reality than Postma’s. He sometimes chooses to use some non-realistic colors to add to the mood of the piece.
In honor of the season which is starting to feel more real and present, I’ve selected a piece called Ice Dawn. This is a striking print which feels like it really reflects the feel of the season. (See what I did there?)
Richard Bosman has been a favorite because of his bold colors, used in interesting ways. (Many of his prints use 1-3 colors, each in various shades.) I’ve shown four of his pieces including my very first share-a-print post!
He does do some exclusively black-and-white prints, and when idly scanning through some of hisB&W prints on his website, my eye was caught by a print I’d undoubtedly seen before but not really noticed. This is one of a series of five prints of New York City places, all with this “white on black” style (as opposed to typical prints which are “black on white”, i.e. white background with black ink printed on it). He calls these five prints “New York Noir”. This style appeals to me more now than the first time I saw it, and this one print in particular really stands out.
Today’s print shows a bridge with another bridge and a mass of lit buildings behind it. The twin towers are in this picture from 1998. if I’m reconstructing this correctly in my mind, the foreground bridge is the Manhattan Bridge and the background bridge is the Brooklyn Bridge, with the WTC towers behind it . Those of you who know the city better are welcome to correct me.
As you may remember, Antonio Frasconi emigrated from Uruguay to the US in 1945. His son quotes Frasconi. ” Antonio used to say that the first thing he did when he got off the boat from Uruguay in 1945, in New Orleans, was go see Duke Ellington and his band play.” Perhaps hyperbolic, but makes a point.
Frasconi created prints of many types, including book covers and illustrations, children’s books of his own, social justice pieces (Pictures with a Point, you might say), and portraits of a number of well-known figures of the 20th century. I find the portraits of people I know about to be spot on. We looked at a portrait of Walt Whitman a while back and I felt he really nailed Whitman. He did portraits of several musicians, including Pablo Casals and Charlie Mingus in addition to Ellington.
Like the vast majority of his work, the Ellington print is a woodcut. He did something very unusual with this print–something I’ve not seen in any other print, of his or other artists. Ellington’s head is typical print art, formed of a complex mass of tiny lines, but the body appears to be plain wood with the grain quite evident. Meaning? Ellington was a sensitive and complex soul, based on a simple and completely natural foundation? Speculations gladly accepted. Ellington’s face is beautifully rendered, suggesting a life rich in emotion and experience.
[I can’t finish writing this without noting a delightful tidbit I came across when doing some research about this print. Frasconi and his wife (both artists, both having written and illustrated children’s books) were close friends with Crockett Johnson and his wife Ruth Krauss. Johnson is well known as the creator of the Harold series of children’s books, initiated by the famous Harold and the Purple Crayon. I only learned about the Harold books as a parent. My introduction to Johnson’s work was the delightful comic strip Barnaby which I came across as a tween just old enough to appreciate that there were multiple levels in the strip. “A boy named Barnaby wishes for a fairy godmother. Instead, he gets a fairy godfather who uses a cigar for a magic wand. Bumbling but endearing, Mr. O’Malley rarely gets his magic to work — even when he consults his Fairy Godfather’s Handy Pocket Guide. The true magic of Barnaby resides in its canny mix of fantasy and satire, amplified by the understated elegance of Crockett Johnson’s clean, spare art.”]
Wengenroth’s prints are mostly the rustic New England scenes we have been looking at and learning to love over the past few months. However, Wengenroth was born and lived in Brooklyn most of his life, traveling extensively in New England but not living there till the last few years of his life. We looked at a NYC scene around 5 weeks ago which lots of people seemed to enjoy.
Today’s NY scene feels seasonally appropriate–no snow on the ground yet, but bare trees.
A month or so ago, I posted a Japanese ink brush painting by Sesshu, one of the earliest Japanese masters of sumi-e (Ink brush painting). Ink brush painting (also known as ink wash painting) originated in China and was adopted and adapted by the Japanese. The ink is made of particles of soot suspended in water. Colors are used in a pretty restrained manner–many paintings are only shades of gray, produced by diluting the ink to various degrees with water. Chinese ink paintings tend to be more complex, containing more brush strokes, and color is used a bit less. Japanese ink paintings tend to emphasize simplicity of form, with fewer brush strokes. Sometimes, watercolors are used to add color into ink paintings.
Years ago, I stumbled upon the work of a local artist who has studied ink brush painting quite extensively, in Japan and China. She’s an amazingly impressive person, holding a PhD from BU, and continuing to teach, consult and paint. Her scholarly field is interdisciplinary, and my best attempt to describe it would be a crossover between cultural studies, design, and urban planning (If that’s not accurate, it’s on me.) I’ve only seen her paintings online, but they are absolutely spectacular. I urge you to look at her paintings and I hope myself to be able to see some of them in person someday.
I selected one today that hews to the Japanese style of relatively few brush strokes, and is enhanced with simple watercolor. The subject is a cricket, a symbol of success and fertility. The painting conveys a lot of feeling with few brush strokes, white and a narrow range of grays, with a blue wash for the sky.
Escher did 240+ fairly conventional prints before starting to produce the kind of remarkable works for which he is famous. ‘… Escher dismissed his works before 1935 as of little or no value as they were “for the most part merely practice exercises…” ‘ Of these earlier works, perhaps half of them were accurate representations of existing buildings, in which Escher experimented with perspective and textures. The product towards which Escher was working with these “practice exercises” was the impossible architecture of pieces such as Belvedere, Up and Down, and Waterfall.
Today’s print depicting the biblical story of the Tower of Babel feels like a rare bridging example. The building itself is rendered with textures very similar to those he employed in dozens of prosaic prints of churches, schools, and other buildings. This print, however, is not a static figure of a conventional building. This print clearly tells a story. The perspective is looking down from above onto the very top floor under construction, where numerous figures (both dark and light-skinned) are engaged not in productive work, but mostly in heated conversation. Similar figures are depicted at several levels of the building further down.
The textures and perspective are interesting in and of themselves, and are visually pleasing in a rather low-key way. The action depicted is very much suggesting a story.
What do you think of this print? Do you feel the story? Do the angles and textures please your eye? It’s worth zooming in to see the details as long as the picture remains sharp.
I have chosen prints with social justice themes or messages a few times. Once, I picked something that I did not find visually interesting/stimulating, and regretted it., even though the message was compelling. As a result, I am making sure now not to allow my enthusiasm for the theme override my judgement about the visual impact of the artwork.
I’ve shown a print by Charles White before. The portrayal of the two people in that print is so detailed, and conveys so much. I really love his work, especially his faces.
Today’s mixed media piece portrays a somewhat less realistic face, but striking and appropriate to the social justice theme of the piece. People more knowledgeable than me murmur about cubism and Picasso-like influence. Please tell me what you think.
