The lighthouse thing was not a deliberate choice. I often look for a picture that reflects something that feels concordant with the moment I’m in, weather being one of the easiest ones. There are a lot of beautiful snow scenes, of course. I’m not a huge fan of snow as a practical thing, but it looks beautiful. It is winter, but so far we haven’t had a lot of snow.
After a week of mostly black and white prints, I wanted something colorful, so I turned back to William Hays, whom you may remember as a Vermont painter turned printmaker to increase accessibility of his works. This piece is set in winter and has some snow, but it’s not primarily a snow scene, and it is in fact a lighthouse scene though I wasn’t specifically looking for one. The color scheme in this print is somewhat muted compared to many of his others–reminds me a bit of Andy Lovell.
We tend to think of the beauty of trees as being bound up with their leaves, especially the gorgeous colors of autumn. We’re now in the season of bare branches, which have their own beauty.
“Ages may have passed before man gained sufficient mental stature to pay admiring tribute to the tree standing in all the glory of its full leafage, shimmering in the sunlight, making its myriad bows to the restless winds; but eons must have lapsed before the human eye grew keen enough and the human soul large enough to give sympathetic comprehension to the beauty of bare branches laced across changing skies, which is the tree-lover’s full heritage. In winter, we are prone to regard our trees as cold, bare, and dreary; and we bid them wait until they are again clothed in verdure before we may accord to them comradeship. However, it is during this winter resting time that the tree stands revealed to the uttermost, ready to give its most intimate confidences to those who love it. It is indeed a superficial acquaintance that depends upon the garb worn for half the year; and to those who know them, the trees display even more individuality in the winter than in the summer. The summer is the tree’s period of reticence, when, behind its mysterious veil of green, it is so busy with its own life processes that it has no time for confidences, and may only now and then fling us a friendly greeting.” Trees At Leisure, Amanda Botsford Comstock, 1916
Today I share two prints created 60 years apart, emphasizing the beauty of bare branched trees in winter.
1991-V, Grietje Postma (Color reduction woodcut, 1991) and Winter Moon at Toyomogahara, Kawase Hasui (Woodcut, 1931)
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.
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?)
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).
