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)
