Print

Vishnu’s consort…..or his ride? Week 12, day 4 (Tuesday)

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I stumbled across a South Asian print artist purely by chance today, and like a lot of his work. Sadly, I have not yet been able to find much written about him or his art in English, so I can’t really get the symbolism in most of it, of which there appears to be a lot. Thus, today’s discussion is longer on speculation and shorter on certainty than I would really like.

Jyoti Bhatt (1934-) grew up in the Indian state of Gujarat and seems to have been living there most of his life. He studied at the university in Baroda (Now called Vadodara), with stints in Naples and New York (Pratt) to learn more. It was at Pratt that he really learned about printmaking, and in particular the intaglio techniques (etching and engraving and their variations). Like many artists, he isn’t limited to one medium–he paints and draws, but print is clearly his major channel. He was the nucleus of a group of print artists that grew in Baroda. At one point, as part of a seminar he was asked to photograph some Gujarati folk art, and this became a passion for him–both photography in and of itself, and documenting/preserving traditional art forms and more broadly, traditional ways of life. Here are a few of those photo graphs, interesting on their own:

Note the peacocks in both photos. Recurring motif.

Today’s print is a peacock, which is a big symbol in Hindu mythology–rather confusing actually. It can represent: the mount of the gods Kartikeya, the god of war, as well as of Ganesha, a god who is the remover of obstacles, and Sri Chanda Bhairava, the god of one of the eight directions; or the goddesses themselves, Lakshmi, goddess of wealth and beauty, Vishnu’s consort, and Saraswati, goddess of benevolence/patience. Given the appearance of the figure, I’d guess that this peacock is meant to represent Lakshmi.

Mayoor (Peacock) (Screenprint, 1983)

Crawling in and out of reality: week 12, day 3 (Monday)

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Escher the printmaker was best known for his interesting perspectives, mathematical approach to art, and the impossible scenes he portrayed. I have committed to showing prints that are visually pleasing rather than primarily of intellectual interest. Thus far, I have stayed away from the kind of work for which he is famous. There are some of his characteristic pieces that are also visually pleasing. Today’s print is one that I find delightful visually.

Escher became friendly with mathematician Bruno Ernst. After spending a lot of time with Escher, Ernst developed a mathematical classification for Escher’s prints, which I will share here for fun.

  1. Regular spatial figures
  2. Regular division of the plane
  3. Spirals
  4. Mobius strips
  5. Perspective
  6. Metamorphoses and cycles
  7. Approaches to infinity
  8. The conflict between depicting someting on a place, and the three-dimensional reality which is depicted
  9. The penetration of more worlds
  10. Spatial anomalies (impossible figures)
  11. Relativities

These categories make sense if you’ve seen a lot of Escher’s work. For those who haven’t and are interested, many of his works can be viewed online at the Escher Foundation’s Gallery. His complete graphic works are published in a book which is out of print, but used copies of which can be found at reasonable prices.

Today’s print, Reptiles, falls into categories 2 and 6 (Regular division of the plane, and Metamorphoses and cycles.) I hope you find it as pleasing as I do.

Reptiles (Lithograph, 1943)

Three Sisters: week 12, day 2 (Sunday)

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Not surprisingly, perhaps, the term the Three Sisters has been used to describe a number of very different things. Indigenous people of Northeast North America used this term to refer to the co-cultivation of corn, beans and squash (which support each other’s growth, as well as being nutritionally complementary). Interestingly, there are two sets of rock formations on opposite ends of the world which are each called the Three Sisters. One is in New South Wales, Australia; the other in Nova Scotia, Canada. The Nova Scotia rock formations lend their name to today’s print, though the picture does not itself portray the three “sea stacks” of rock, but rather a fishing shack in the area with a sign reading “3 Sisters”.

Today’s artist is again William Hays, Vermont painter-turned-printmaker producing incredibly detailed color prints using the technique of color reduction relief printing.

Three Sisters (Color reduction linocut)

A Christmas tree? Week 12, Day 1

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Looking for something appropriate for this day, I came across this by Helene Bautista. You may remember a somewhat similar print by her that I showed a couple of weeks ago during a brief snowfall with the faint outline of an evergreen in the falling snow. Today’s print shows a more definite tree, with an unobstructed view. The artist creates an unusual and interesting textured, mostly white, background, using the aquatint technique with a sandpaper ground.

A very merry Christmas to all my friends who celebrate, and a happy winter solstice to everyone!

Winter (Aquatint with sandpaper ground, 2019)

Poetry and print–a common convergence: week 11, day 7 (Friday)

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I don’t think I’m particularly looking for it, but I have come cross a few places where poetry and graphic art intersect, either inspiring the other . It popped up again today. I was given a copy of a Jewish legend from the Zohar (one of the foundational texts of Jewish mysticism) called The Alphabet of Creation, adapted and illustrated with prints by the Lithuanian-American-Jewish artist Ben Shahn. My mom is a big fan of Shahn, but aside from one print hanging on the wall of our living room, I wasn’t really familiar with this artist. With the Alphabet of Creation in hand, I decided to explore Shahn’s print art. Some I liked, some I didn’t, but I discovered that Shahn had a particular fascination with the 19th/20th century Austrian poet-novelist Rainer Maria Rilke. I don’t know RIlke’s work well, but a particular quotation I had long ago encountered gave him a special lustre in my memory. (From his Letters to a Young Poet: “For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.”)

Shahn actually created a series of 24 lithographs (The Rilke Portfolio) inspired by a single long paragraph in Rilke’s only novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. The passage is beautiful, and the lithographs are interesting and beautiful riffs on the passage. Today’s print, however, is not one of those, but rather another Rilke-associated print called Birds Over the City. This print is “assembled” from 3 motifs found in the Rilke Portfolio: several doves together, shown above a representation of a city, with a minimalist figure of Rilke’s face superimposed. Doves are often a symbol of love. Cities can be places to meet people, but when unpartnered, can feel very lonely. Love and loneliness are important themes in Rilke’s writing. (The portion of the print which is just Rilke’s face and the doves was also used in a poster Shahn created for a gallery called Atelier Mourlot.)

Symbolism aside, I find this picture visually appealing–harmonious, even. Love predominates over possible loneliness in the feel. How does it grab you?

Birds Over The City (Lithograph, 1968) with comparison images by the same artist

“Yonder ragged cliff has thousand faces in a thousand hours”: week 11, day 6 (Thursday)

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“Onward, and nearer draws the sun of May,
And wide around the marriage of the plants
Is sweetly solemnized; then flows amain
The surge of summer’s beauty; dell and crag,
Hollow and lake, hill-side, and pine arcade,
Are touched with genius. Yonder ragged cliff
Has thousand faces in a thousand hours.” –from Musketaquid, Ralph Waldo Emerson

Andy Lovell, contemporary British print artist, has been growing on me. I’ve been looking at a lot of his recent prints. Today’s print represents Birling Gap, an area of cliffs located in the midst of the Seven Sisters, a series of famous white chalk cliffs along the southern coastline of Sussex which are a big tourist destination.. (Sussex is the region of of England, south and slightly east of London; notable for many reasons, including being a former Saxon kingdom, site of the Battle of Hastings, and the place to which Sherlock Holmes retired to keep bees.) These are absolutely gorgeous prints–their interesting color schemes have definitely gotten under my skin in the best possible way.

Birling Gap (Screenprint, 2021)

Bird, boat and boulders: week 11, day 5 (Wednesday)

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Name that artist! For those of you who are regular viewers, one glance at the picture will likely tell you who the printmaker is. We’ve looked at his work before, but I don’t think we’ve ever seen sailboats, birds only once, and rocks several times but not together with birds.

The look of the boats and the fact that there are two shown makes me think perhaps this is a race. I feel the motion of the bird and of the boats, and of course the texture of the rocks is marvelous.

SPACE

INTENTIONALLY

LEFT BLANK to avoid the spoiler

Who is it? Yes, it’s Stow Wengenroth. I could stare at his prints for hours…

Going home (Lithograph, 1972)

Another Martin Lewis nocturnal scene–he really excels at this: week 11, day 4 (Tuesday)

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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.

Arch, Midnight (Drypoint, 1930)

TFW you like the preliminary sketch better than the final product: week 11, day 2 (Sunday)

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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)

Beautiful, near photorealistic landscapes by another (new to me) practitioner of color reduction relief prints: week 11, day 1 (Saturday) of share-a-print-a-day

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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?)

Ice Dawn (Linocut color reduction, undated)

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