bioraphy – ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon

Walter Claude Flight, Title Unknown, (Swimmers). Date Unknown, Linocut Print

Walter Claude Flight was a world renown British printmaker born in London, England, in the year 1881. He attended the Heatherly School of Fine Art in London, England; and he subsequently taught at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in London.

Flight was a member of a group called the ‘Seven and Five Society’, composed of seven painters and five sculptors that all produced modernist styles of art. The group included sculptor and printmaker Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hapworth. Flight was known for pioneering and popularizing the linoleum cut technique. He also painted, illustrated, and made wood cuts.

Influenced by Cubism, Futurism and Vorticism, Flight’s work expressed dynamic rhythm through bold, simple forms. His linocut prints show his interest in depicting speed and movement.

Ishii Shigeo, “Fissure” from his 1955-1957 series “Violence”

Ishii Shigeo became a reportage painter not by visiting remote villages or participating in demonstrations, but by exploring his country’s uneasy subconscious. Hobbled by debilitating asthma after a nearly fatal childhood attack, Ishii studied classical painting as a teenager but developed a distinct style of social critique in his oil paintings and etchings through his association with Ikeda Tatsuo, Nakamura Hiroshi, and other reportage and avant-garde painters. Conflating his own excruciating affliction with his country’s postwar predicament, Ishii, who died at 28 in 1962, left a large body of work still mostly neglected.

Because Ishii’s father was a bureaucrat in the Ministry of Finance with a secure salary, his mother was able to nurse her frail son, providing him with art lessons to compensate for the formal education his illness frequently absented him from, and paying for art supplies as his talent and passion for his increasingly morose vision became apparent. His younger sister remembered Ishii reading the entire newspaper every day in grade school. “He was the first to go and get the newspaper. I think he had his antennae out, waiting for information.” His friend Ikeda Tatsuo recalled: “When I got to know him, he had a nihilistic way of talking and an ironic smile. But he was always making remarks that were right on target. He was only 20 years old, but he’d already read Jean Genet and used to quote him.”