Tag: 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.

Mimmo Paladino

Paintings and Etchings by Mimmo Paladino

Mimmo Paladino is an Italian sculptor, painter and printmaker. He was born Domenico Paladino in Paduli, Campania, southern Italy. He attended the Liceo Artistico of Benevento (Benevento Art High School) from 1964 to 1968, when minimalism and conceptualism dominated the international art scene. He played a leading part in the international revival of painting towards the end of the 1970s.

His first work, in line with the prevailing conceptual climate at the time, showed an interest in photography, but in 1977 he had already moved on to the creation of two major tempera murals, one at the Toselli gallery in Milan and one at the Lucio Amelio gallery in Naples. In 1980, he exhibited his work at the Venice Biennale, in the “Aperto 80” exhibition.

However, it was largely thanks to a picture exhibition held in a range of Central European museums, from the Kunsthalle in Basel, to the Museum Folkwang in Essen and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, that Paladino finally consolidated his international fame. Meanwhile, two personal exhibitions were held simultaneously in New York that year, by Annina Nosei and Marian Goodman, extending his fame to the United States.

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.

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.”

Macbeth

Artist Unknown, “Macbeth, Banquo, and the Three Witches”, 1803, Published by John and Josiah Boydell, London

In 1789, the publisher John Boydell opened the Shakespeare Gallery, an exhibition space in London’s Pall Mall showcasing paintings that exclusively represented scenes from Shakespeare’s plays. The Gallery was a bid to revive historical painting in contemporary British art, a genre thought to be of great public benefit because of its morally instructive messages. The works of Shakespeare had become very popular and integral to British identity by the middle of the eighteenth century.

The Gallery opened in May 1789 with an exhibition of thirty-four canvases by eighteen British artists. By 1796 there were eighty-four canvases exhibited, along with dozens of smaller paintings. Once the exhibition was mounted, reproductive engravings of the paintings produced by an in-house team of forty-six printmakers were available to purchase, either as a large portfolio of ninety prints or as a luxurious illustrated edition of the plays.

The above “Macbeth, Banquo, and the Three Witches” was an illustration from a bound 1803 portfolio by Boydell Publishers entitled “A Collection of Prints, from Pictures Painted for the Purpose of Illustrating the Dramatic Works of Shakespeare, by the Artists of Great Britain”.

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.