Ben's Passion for Prints and Miscellaneous Musings on Art
Prints and other visual art
I’ve shown new artists’ work for the past two days, so I thought that today I’d bring us back to familiar territory. John Taylor Arms was a renowned etcher. with a very detailed style similar to Martin Lewis or Wengenroth, but with pictures that are less photorealistic–less likely to be mistaken for photographs. Here’s a beautiful etching of an arch in Perugia, Italy.
I am continually awed by the seemingly infinite variety of human artistic expression, even when confined to one medium. I keep discovering new artists I like, whose work may have something in common with one or more artists I already know and love, but whose style is distinctive.
Enter Giertje Postma (1961-). She came to the Academie Minerva in Groningen in 1984 to learn to paint. She quickly learned that the clean lines of drawing suited her better than painting, but drawing wasn’t quite right. She found her way to printmaking, and left Groningen in 1989 a skilled printmaker.
Her chosen technique is color woodcut reduction, a complex method involving printing one color layer on as many pieces of paper as desired for final product, then carving away the block to leave the areas desired in the next color and printing the 2nd color on those same papers (very carefully aligned, of course), and so on. Postma crushes it with this technique, as you’ll see shortly. This is such a complicated process that I doubt my very brief explanation does more than give you a vague idea, so here are a few better descriptions with pictures, starting with the shortest and getting longer as you go down the list.
Postma’s dazzling prints feel like a combination of the detailed, texture, almost photorealistic B&W prints of Martin Lewis or Stow Wengenroth , with the vivid colors of Andy Lovell. Again, you hear my cry of pain at having to choose one print among many amazing ones. In the end, as with many of these choices, I picked one that was not only beautiful, which felt appropriate to the circumstance (day, season, weather, etc).
I had a beautiful springy print picked out, and then it started to snow, and I decided I needed a snow print. Turns out there are tons of prints of fallen snow, on the ground and other surfaces, but very few of snow actually falling. It’s an interesting counterpoint to paintings, of which there are many excellent falling snow examples.
Helene Bautista is from Toulouse, France, and became a print artist around 2012. As a lesser known contemporary printmaker, I was unable to find a whole lot of information about her. No Wikipedia entry! She is fairly prolific, and employs a variety of different techniques, often together in the same print. In addition to this print, she has several other falling snow prints that I may share in the future, as the occasion and mood suit.
Check out her other prints:
https://www.instagram.com/bautistahelene/?hl=en
https://helenebautista.weebly.com/
Do you have any favorite pictures of falling snow? I won’t insist on prints from you, but I’d love to see examples of snow pix you love, whatever the medium.
I’ve been showing Wengenroth prints pretty much every week since the beginning, and I’ve referred to his typical New England Scenes like lighthouses, but I just realized I’d never shown one of his prints of a lighthouse. There are so many to choose from, it’s a bit daunting. I was looking at some of his lithographs just as the sun was going down, so today’s print caught my eye.
Mario Avati (1921-2009) studied many techniques of printmaking in Paris, and in the early portion of his career, mostly did etchings. Around 10 years into his graphic arts career, he began to focus on mezzotint, a much less commonly used printmaking technique which allows grays to be created organically rather than by tricks such as stippling. Mezzotint is a black-to-white technique–that is, the background is black (completely inked) and white is created by removing material from the surface of the plate. Not many artists have mastered the mezzotint, but Avati was one of the most highly skilled practitioners.
The vast majority of Avati’s pieces are color mezzotint still lifes (in French, nature mortes–“dead nature”). The technique is exquisite, and the contrast between the colors and the black background gives these pieces a very different feel than most visual art (with light-colored backgrounds). Some of the still lifes suggest the possibility of a hidden meaning, an allegory or symbolism–and others just appear to be exquisite renderings of everyday objects. I’m sure I am missing much of the symbolism, and would love to be enlightened if anyone figures it out. In L’as de pique (Ace of spades), the red diamonds “falling” off the back of the card is undoubtedly meant to symbolize something, though I’m damned if I can figure out what. Les cafetieres (the coffepots) doesn’t even suggest what in it might be symbolic.
JJ Lankes (1884-1960) was an incredibly talente.d American printmakes, working exclusively in wood. He sometimes employed classic woodcut relief techniques (such as we’ve seen with the Japanese printmakers as well as Richard Bosman), but was best known for a related technique called (confusingly) wood engraving. Regular woodcuts are carved on the side grain. Wood engraving is also a relief techinque, and carves wood on the end grain. This necessitates the use of different tools and is often easier to do in a “white on black” (white lines on black background) format rather than the “black on white” which is typical for regular woodcuts.
Lankes was recognized for his extraordinary talent fairly early in his career and was geting a goodly number of commissions, both fine art and commercial, including quite a few book illustrations and cover designs. Lankes read Robert Frost’s poety and found it resonated for him. He did some prints for himself, inspired by Frost’s work. Independently, Frost saw some of Lankes’ illustrations for other writers, and asked him to do illustrations for Frost’s poem The Star-Splitter. The two were delighted to discover that they were simpatico–sharing what Frost called “a coincidence in taste”. They worked together on several more projects. As an example of Lankes’ stuborn insistence on making things the way he really felt they should be, he created a “tailpiece” (final illustration) for The Starsplitter which was published with the poem. Years later, he was still not satisfied and created not one, but two more designs for the tailpiece purely for his own internal need.
To introduce Lankes’ work, I have selected a beautiful print of a building in Rochester, along with the cover and the original tailpiece of The Star-Splitter.
I am trying to learn about the history of African-American art in order to better understand the work of many talented artists of color. There’s a lot I have to learn, but this one point really comes through loud and clear. One of the most important ways of ending the perpetual cycle of inequity is to make sure to represent people of color in every medium, in every realm and sector of society. Art is one powerful tool towards that end. Margaret Burroughs was very focused on that goal, especially with regard to children.
Today’s prints are a couple of Burroughs’ works which are simple in terms of meaning, and lovely and simple in terms of taking them in.
Martin Lewis’ nocturnal NYC scenes really are his best. Some of them are bit “noir”, ominous or foreboding, but today’s print is very sweet. A “Chance Meeting” on a sidewalk in Manhattan, at night outside a brightly lit store, seems full of the excitement of hope and possibility. This print was made by drypoint, the uncommon fine needle engraving technique of which Lewis was really a master.
I keep discovering new printmakers I like, but I already have so many I love. I’ve decided I will not do more than one day of the same artist in a week, but I’m not hesitating to come back to some of my favorite artists every week. I’ve shown some of Bosman’s color prints before (1, 2, 3)–he tends to utilize a very limited palette of colors within one print, which, like most constraints on an artistic form, actually opens up interesting possibilities. This gives his pictures a pretty distinctive feel, and I feel it’s not too hard to identify things by him just by looking.
Today’s print is called The Edge; the bridge does come to an abrupt stop, creating an edge, but what’s the metaphor? Is it implying the edge of the city? the edge of “civilized society”?
What do I like about what I keep callling “classic” prints? Black and white which focuses on the shapes, and lots of detail and texture. I recently came across an Edward Gorey pen-and-ink drawing and was reminded that his style is very similar to those “classic” prints. His style when illustrating his own books or creating for himself is quite distinctive. He also did book covers and illustrations for others and it’s remarkable how differently he could draw under those circumstances.
His own books tended towards the bizarre and macabre (e.g. The Gashlycrumb Tinies, a rhyming alphabet poem with each letter presenting a child who died in an unusual fashion). One of his most recognizable products was the opening sequence for the PBS Mystery series starting in 1980. (Gorey drew pictures and a sequence, but it ran for too long, so PBS turned it over to an animator to take Gorey’s drawings and animate them. There have been many versions over the years.)
I’ve chosen a couple of drawings that I like, as well as a few from the Mystery opening sequence.
