Category: etching

Reynold Weidenaar

Etchings by Reynold Weidenaar

Reynold Weidenaar was born in Grand Rapids in 1915. He studied at the Kendall School of Design and then at the Kansas City Art Institute. He won national awards while still a first year student. After moving back to Michigan from Kansas City, he quickly achieved fame and acclaim. He taught at Kendall School of Design for many years, but is best known for his exquisite black and white mezzotints. Reynold Weidenaar was internationally acclaimed for his work, focusing on local scenes, humor and satire, his personal worldview and politics in his work.

Reynold Weidenaar was a master of a technique known as intaglio printing.  In this type of printing, the artist uses special tools to etch an image into a metal plate.  The plate is then coated with ink, a piece of paper is placed on top, and the whole thing is run through a printing press, which transfers the image to the paper.  In order for the image to come out correctly, the artist much etch everything into the metal plate backwards.  This is especially impressive when you consider the detail and complexity present in many of Weidenaar’s prints.

Paul Landacre

Paul Landacre, “Children’s Carnival”, Etching, No Date, 8.5 x 12 inches, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Currently Not on View.

Paul Hambleton Landacre, born in 1893 in Columbus, Ohio, participated in the Southern California artistic Renaissance between the world wars and is regarded as one of the outstanding printmakers of the modern era. His stylistic innovations and technical virtuosity gained wood engraving a foothold as an art form in twentieth-century America.

Landacre’s linocuts and wood engravings of landscapes, still lifes, nudes, and abstractions are marked for their design and mastery of material. He used the finest inks and Japanese papers and, with a few exceptions, printed his wood engravings on a nineteenth-century Washington Hand Press, which is now in the collection of the International Printing Museum in Carson, California.

Max Klinger

Etchings by Max Klinger

Max Klinger was a German Symbolist painter, sculptor, printmaker, and writer. Klinger was born in Leipzig and studied in Karlsruhe. An admirer of the etchings of Menzel and Goya, he shortly became a skilled and imaginative engraver in his own right. Klinger began creating sculptures in the early 1880s. From 1883–1893 he lived in Rome, and became increasingly influenced by the Italian Renaissance and antiquity.

Klinger was cited by many artists (notably Giorgio de Chirico) as being a major link between the Symbolist movement of the 19th century and the start of the metaphysical and Surrealist movements of the 20th century. Asteroid 22369 Klinger is named in his honor.

Images from Top to Bottom: “Pursuit of the Centaur”, 1881, “The Titans”, 1892, Metropolitan Museum of Art; “Abduction of Prometheus”, 1894. “Prometheus Unbound”, 1894

Jim Dine

Tool Series: Etchings by Jim Dine

Jim Dine’s work has been the subject of major surveys and retrospectives in venues spanning the globe, and he is represented in museum collections worldwide. While others have often associated his work with the Pop Art movement of the mid-20th century, his fascination with popular imagery and everyday objects has always carried a more personal component.

Dine has extensively explored particular themes in a variety of media throughout his career, such as the universal symbol of the heart and images of tools. These themes have acquired the status of personal iconography and he claims them as part of his vocabulary or his “glossary of terms.”

Jim Dine believes that tools provide a ‘link with our past, the human past, the hand’. They feature in many of his works, and can be seen as a symbol of artistic creation. There is also an autobiographical resonance, as Dine’s family owned a hardware store in Cincinnati.

Kyoko Imazu and Damon Kowarski

Etchings from Copper Plates by Kyoko Imazu and Damon Kowarski

Kyoko Imazu and Damon Kowarsky have worked together since 2010. Their prints are made using a simple collaborative system. Damon gives Kyoko a drawing, to which Kyoko adds her own interpretations. The resulting image is then etched onto copper plates and printed by hand. Together, they have produced works of great subtlety, variety and humour exploring themes such as nature, science, art and technology.

The prints in this exhibition grew out of the zine “Talking of a Chameleon”, which was made in response to a zine commission by IMPRINT magazine in March 2011. Since then, the zine has been part of fairs in London, Perth and the Czech Republic.

Yoko Imazu holds a Bachelor of Fine Art in Printmaking, a Diploma of Visual Arts, and a Certificate in Foundation Studies Art in Design and Communication, all from RMIT in Melbourne.  Damon Kowarsky studied printmaking at the Victoria College of the Arts (VCA) and Glasgow School of Art, and Advanced Figure Drawing at RMIT. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Art, Honors, in Printmaking from VCA.

Kelly Fearing

Six Etchings by Kelly Fearing

Kelly Fearing was one of the first Texas painters to reject the bluebonnets, cowboys and secondhand Impressionism that had been the mainstays of the state’s artistic output since the end of the 19th century. Along with the other members of the Fort Worth Circle, Fearing introduced Texas to European Modernists like Picasso and Miró. He helped introduce the Texas population to abstraction, surrealism and cubism, all new forms of art not previously promoted in the area.

Even in the 1940s, Fearing lived as an openly gay man. Like the later work of gay artist David Hockney, Fearing’s subjects were often pretextual reasons to introduce the subject of homoeroticism into the contemporary art world. One example of this is his 1950 “Male Bather”, an emerging, transitional work influenced by the work of Paul Klee, which exemplifies tthe  theme used by many artists of the time.

In a 2000 interview, Fearing said in reply to a question about the Fort Worth Circle: “We were considered way out at the time. But we were just doing what we liked.” This individualism made Fearing into one of Texas’ most important Modernists.

Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon, “Figure Reflected in Mirror”, 1977, Color Etching on Arches Paper, 36.5 x 27 Inches

Francis Bacon was an Irish-born British figurative painter known for his emotionally charged raw imagery. He produced series of images of popes, crucifixions, and portraits of close friends, with abstracted figures sometimes isolated in geometrical cages, set against flat, nondescript backgrounds.

Bacon said that he saw images ‘in series’; and his work typically focuses on a single subject for sustained periods, often in diptych or triptych formats. His work which numbers almost six hundred paintings, including some he destroyed, can be described as variations on single motifs. These include the 1930s ‘Furies’ and the bio-morphs influenced by Picasso; the 1940s male heads in rooms; the 1950s screaming popes, the later 1950s animals and lone figures,;the  crucifixions done in the 1960s; the later 1960s portraits of friends; the sea-portraits in the 1970s; and the more technical 1980s paintings with the cooler palettes.

Donald Pass

Etchings and Paintings by Donald Pass

Donald Pass was a British painter and visionary artist whose art has often been compared to that of William Blake by reviewers. He is known for work based on a vision he experienced, which has been interpreted as the Resurrection of the Dead. His work is found in museums and private collections in Europe, the United States, and Australia.

Born in Congleton, Cheshire, Donald attended the King’s school in Macclesfield. He then enrolled at Burslem College of Art in 1947, from where he won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Art in London. When he was called up for national service, a medical examination found that Donald’s eyesight was poor. He instead began teaching art at Walsall Art College, moving to Drake Hall Prison in Stafford, where he managed to establish art on the curriculum, and later to Liverpool College of Art where John Lennon was one of his students.

The Wolf of Chazes

Artist Unknown, “The Wolf of Chazes Displayed at Versailles”, 1765, Engraving, Département Réserve des Livres Rares, Paris

Text:

“Représentation de la Bête du Gévaudan qui a fait tant de ravages dans ce pays et dans l’Auvergne, laquelle a été tuée le 20 septembre dernier par M. Antoine, chevalier de Saint Louis, seul porte-arquebuse de sa Majesté et présentée le 1er octobre au Roy et à la famille royale par M. Antoine de Beauterne fils. Pour que cet animal se conserve dans son naturel, on l’a disséqué, embaumé et attaché sur une planche tel qu’il est ici représenté.

À Paris, chez Mondhare, rue Saint-Jacques. Gravure extraite du recueil factice de pièces relatives à la bête du Gévaudan, formé par Gervais-François Magné de Marolles.”

“Representation of the Beast of Gévaudan, which has wreaked so much havoc in this country and in Auvergne, was killed on September 20th by M. Antoine, Chevalier de Saint Louis, the only harquebus holder of his Majesty, and presented on the 1st October to Roy and the royal family by M. Antoine de Beauterne fils. To keep this animal in its natural state, it has been dissected, embalmed and attached to a board as shown here.

In Paris, at Mondhare, rue Saint-Jacques. Engraving extracted from the fictitious collection of parts relating to the beast of Gévaudan, formed by Gervais-François Magné de Marolles.”

Mitsuo Shiraishi

Mitsuo Shiraishi, “The Woods Between”, Etching and Aquatint on Paper

Born in 1969, Mitsou Shiraishi lives and works in Mulhouse, France. After graduating from college in Japan, he studied fine art in France at “Les Beaux Arts” in Lyon and Mulhouse. Shiraishi also received guidance at the Rémy Bucciali studio in Colmar, which gave him the necessary experience to start as a graphic artist and with etchings.

Today, he is a highly qualified printmaker, and collaborates with various international artists. Since 1994 he has also had a large number of exhibitions at biennials and galleries around the world.

Mitsuo Shiraishi’s motifs are characterized by Japanese art history and background, with sober colors and a narrative of small objects in an open landscape where perspective is often absent.