Ben's Passion for Prints and Miscellaneous Musings on Art
Prints and other visual 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.
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.
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.
I’ve already established that I tend to enjoy monochrome (esp black and white) prints more than color, in general. I’m also discovering that many of the printmakers I like are from and/or do a lot of scenes of New York City. Having lived in the city myself for 7 years, I really enjoy these. Am I discovering so many of them because NYC has a lively arts scene and therefore lots of printmakers gravitate there? Is it a popular subject because these prints sell well? Many of the NYC prints that have caught my eye are really pretty pictures, but don’t grab me in my gut. It’s hard to articulate, but it feels like I’m getting some sense of artistic depth. I’m not necessarily talking about meaning here–I’m just talking about a different kind of artistic value, which is likely very personal.
Today, I looked at the works of five modern or contemporary NYC print artists, and four of them produced very attractive pieces which pleased my eye but didn’t produce a visceral reaction. Karen Whitman is the fifth. I can’t say her pieces feel profoundly meaningful per se, but they do evoke a much deeper feeling than the other four artists. Whitman is still alive and working, has worked as a circus performer, and creates music as well as visual art. Her medium is relief block prints, both linocuts (as in this piece) and woodcuts. Her works are modestly priced as these things go, and I encourage you to look at more of her work
