Category: wood cut

Tom Killion

Five Woodcut Engravings by Tom Killion

Californian-born Tom Killion takes inspiration from 19th century Japanese prints to recreate epic engravings of American landscapes. He describes his technique, tongue-in-cheek, as “faux ukiyo-ë” to emphasize his aesthetic debt to the landscape prints of early 19th century Japan, but also to acknowledge his embrace of early 20th century European / American wood-engraving and book illustration techniques and styles as well. Among his influences are both the Japanese ukiyo-ë landscape masters Hokusai and Hiroshige, but also European and American wood-engravers such as Eric Gill and Rockwell Kent.

Killion carves his images into cherry, all-shina plywood, Amsterdam linoleum and other block materials using Japanese handtools. He prints his often elaborate, multi-colored images on handmade Japanese kozo papers using oil-based inks and a German hand-cranked proofing press.

Alison Saar

Alison Saar, “Snakeman”, 1994, Woodcut and Lithograph Printed in Color on Oriental Paper, Image and sheet: 27 7/8 x 37 1/8 in.

Alison Saar is an American sculptor, painter and installation artist. She was born in Los Angeles, California, and grew up in Laurel Canyon, California. Her parents were Betye Saar, a well-known African-American artist, and Richard Saar, an art conservationist. . She received a BA from Scripps College (Claremont, CA) in 1978, having studied African and Caribbean art with Dr. Samella Lewis. Saar’s thesis was on African-American folk art. She received an MFA from Otis Art Institute, now known as Otis College of Art and Design  in Los Angeles, California in 1981.

Her sculptures and installations explore themes of African cultural diaspora and spirituality, and her studies of Latin American, Caribbean and African art and religion have informed her work. Saar’s fascination with vernacular folk art and ability to build an oasis of beauty from cast-off objects are evident in her sculptures and paintings.

Andrea Rich

Andrea Rich, “Thistle”, 2001, Woodcut on Hosho Paper, 50.8 x 60.1 cm, Edition: 4/30; Collection of Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, Wausau, Wisconsin

Since 1980, internationally recognized woodcut printmaker and artist Andrea Rich has traveled the world observing wildlife in their natural habitat. Madagascar, New Zealand, Costa Rica, Africa and Europe are some of the places outside North America that she has visited in search of interesting subjects. She then designs her drawing based upon personal observations in the field, carves and hand-pulls prints in her studio in Santa Cruz California.

A typical print requires ten to twenty blocks. Working in the studio full time, a print could take two or three weeks to design and carve the blocks, and another two weeks to press as many as 20 colors on each print. Editions of her work generally number 30 or less.

Kawase Hasui

 

Kawase Hasui “Night Rain at Omiya”, 1930

Born in May of 1883, Hasui Kawase was one of modern Japan’s most important and prolific printmakers. He was a prominent founder of the shin-hanga, or new prints, movement whose artists executed traditional subjects in a style influenced by Western art.

At the age of twenty six, Hasui ceased working at his family’s rope and thread wholesaling business and studied Western style painting under Yōga-style artist Okada Saburōsuke for two years. Hasui then approached Nihonga artist Kiyokata Kaburagi, the leading master of the bijin-ga genre, to teach him; it was Kiyokata who gave him the name ‘Hasui’, which translates as ‘water gushing from a spring’.

At the studio of Kiyokata, Hasui studied traditional Japanese painting and ukiyo-e, a genre of art which flourished from the seventeenth though the nineteenth centuries.. He worked almost exclusively on landscape and townscape prints based on sketches and watercolors he made during travels around Japan. Hasui’s work depicted not only those famous places typical of early ukiyo-e masters, but also featured locales which were obscure in urbanizing Japan. Unlike other artists, he did include the captions and titles that were standard in traditional ukiyo-e prints. Among Hasui’s most original and best known works were his snow scenes rendered with naturalistic light, shade and texture. 

During a career which spanned over forty years, Hasui designed approximately six hundred-twenty prints and worked closely with publisher Shōzaburō Watanabe, an advocate of the shin-hanga movement. Through the efforts of American art patron Robert Miller, his work became widely known in the West. In late 1953, the government Committee for the Preservation of Intangible Cultural Treasures commissioned Hasui to make a collection of traditionally-made prints. The production of these works were carefully documented and, in 1956, he was named a Japanese Living National Treasure. 

Hasui Kawase died on November 27, 1957 at the age of seventy-four. He left a large collection of his woodblock prints and watercolors, many of which are linked to the woodblock prints, oil paintings, traditional hanging scrolls, and several folding screens. In 1979, Author Narazaki Munishige published Hasui’s biography and compiled the first comprehensive, annotated listing of all his known works

Paul Landacre

Wood Engraving Landscapes by Paul Landacre

Although he took some life-drawing classes at the Otis Art Institute between 1923 and 1925, Paul Landacre largely taught himself the art of printmaking. He experimented with the technically demanding art of carving linoleum blocks and, eventually, woodblocks for both wood engravings and woodcuts. Landacre’s fascination with printmaking and his ambition to make a place for himself in the world of fine art coalesced in the late 1920s when he met Jake Zeitlin.

Zeitlin’s antiquarian bookshop in Los Angeles, a cultural hub that survived into the 1980s. included a small gallery space for the showing of artworks, primarily prints and drawings. It is there in 1930 that Landacre was given his first significant solo exhibition. Zeitlin’s ever-widening circle of artists came to include Edward Weston, a photographer who shared the modernist vision that so captivated Landacre. Well-connected to the New York art scene, Zeitlin associated himself with the circle of artists represented by Carl Zigrosser, director of the Weyhe Gallery in Manhattan and, later, curator of prints at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

By 1936 Zigrosser considered Landacre to be “one of the few graphic artists worth watching” in America, and included him among his portraits of 24 contemporary American printmakers in his seminal work, “The Artist in America” (Knopf 1942). Elected a member of the National Academy in 1946, Landacre was honored in 1947 with a solo exhibition of his wood engravings at the Smithsonian Museum, its graphic arts division under the curatorial leadership of Jacob Kainen.

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Jürgen Wittdorf

Woodcut Prints and Linocuts by Jürgen Wittdorf

Jürgen Wittdorf is a German painter and graphic artist, mainly known through his book illustrations and large sized woodcuts and linocuts. In 1960-1961, he created a series called “For the Youth”, which portrayed young hooligans and youths either dressed in jeans or posed in full frontal nudity. This “Westernization” earned Wittdorf criticisms from the German state.

Note: An interesting and extensive article to read on the attitudes regarding homosexuality in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) during the last half of the twentieth-century is Eric A. Gordon’s homage to his friend Michael Kuschnia which was published in the January 2021 online People’s World. The article, which covers their fifty-year friendship and correspondences can be found at: https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/homage-to-michael-my-east-german-friend-of-half-a-century/

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi

Woodcut Prints by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (月岡 芳年; also named Taiso Yoshitoshi 大蘇 芳年)  was a Japanese artist who lived from 1839-1892. He is widely recognized as the last great master of the ukiyo-e genre of woodblock printing and painting. Yoshitoshi is also regarded as one of the form’s greatest innovators. His career spanned two eras – the last years of Edo period Japan, and the first years of modern Japan following the Meiji Restoration. Like many Japanese, Yoshitoshi was interested in new things from the rest of the world, but over time he became increasingly concerned with the loss of many aspects of traditional Japanese culture, among them traditional woodblock printing.

By the end of his career, Yoshitoshi was in an almost single-handed struggle against time and technology. As he worked on in the old manner, Japan was adopting Western mass reproduction methods like photography and lithography. Nonetheless, in a Japan that was turning away from its own past, Yoshitoshi almost singlehandedly managed to push the traditional Japanese woodblock print to a new level, before it effectively died with him.

His life is perhaps best summed up by John Stevenson: “Yoshitoshi’s courage, vision and force of character gave ukiyo-e another generation of life, and illuminated it with one last burst of glory.”

—John Stevenson, Yoshitoshi’s One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, 1992

M. C. Escher

M. C. Escher, “Snakes”, 1969, Woodcut Print, 49.8 x 44.7 cm,

“Snakes” is a woodcut print by the Dutch artist Maurits Cornelia Escher. First printed in July of 1969, the print was Escher’s last before his death on March 27, 1972.

Maurits Cornelia Escher was a Dutch graphic artist who made mathematically inspired woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints. In 1918, he studied at the Technical College of Delft. Escher then attended Haarlem School of Architecture and Decorative Arts from 1919 to 1922, studying drawing and the art of woodcut printing.

Escher’s work is inescapably mathematical. This has caused a disconnect between his full-on popular fame and the lack of esteem with which he has been viewed in the art world. His originality and mastery of graphic techniques are respected, but his works have been thought too intellectual and insufficiently lyrical by critics. However, Escher’s narrative themes and his use of perspective have made his work highly attractive to the public.

M. C. Eschers woodcut “Snakes” depicts a disc made up of interlocking circles that grow progressively smaller towards the center and towards the edge. There are three snakes laced through the edge of the disc. The image is printed in three colours: green, brown and black. The use of snakes and the color palette of this composition recalls an earlier 1960 woodcut by the artist,”Möbius Strip I”.

The print haa rotational symmetry based on the number three, comprising a single wedge-shaped image repeated three times in a circle. This means that it was printed from three blocks that were rotated on a pin to make three impressions each. Close inspection of the print reveals the central mark left by the pin.

In several of his earlier works, Escher explored the limits of infinitesimal size and infinite number by actually carrying through the rendering of smaller and smaller figures to the smallest possible sizes. In “Snakes”, the infinite diminution of size and infinite increase in number is only suggested in the finished work.

Swedish pianist Fredrik Ullén used the “Snakes” print for the cover art of his 1998 album entitled “György Ligeti: Complete Piano Music, Volume 2”.

Clare Leighton

Clare Leighton “Cutting” 1931, Wood Engraving, Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Clare Leighton’s “Cutting” is an image from her Canadian Lumber Camp series. In this wood-engraving, the strength of the working men is conveyed through the curves of the black silhouettes, with a minimal use of white line, seen against the snowy backdrop. The landscape and figures are successfully bound together.

A particularly striking feature of this series is Clare Leighton’s depiction of the magical light of snow in the forest. This is achieved through her use of the multiple tool, which enables the gouging of several lines with a single stroke, that she began using in 1930.