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.
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’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.
Arch of the Conca, Perugia: Italian Series (etching, 1926)
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’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.
Rochester (1922, wood engraving)
The Starsplitter (Robert Frost poem) cover and original tailpiece (1923, wood engraving)
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.
