Tag: lithography

Joseph Gielniak

Etchings by Joseph Gielniak

Joseph Gielniak was born in a family of Polish immigrants in France, where he finished high school and studied for a year at the famous Ecole des Beaux Arts in Vallenciennes. He went to Poland in 1950 with the intention of studying at the Department of Consular and Diplomatic in Warsaw. This plan was canceled due to a severe case of lung disease. At the age of 21 Joseph Gielniak was sent to a sanatorium in Bukowiec near Kowary in Lower Silesia, where he spent almost his entire adult life. The architectural elements and the environment of the sanatorium were frequent motifs in his art.

Reginald Marsh

Reginald Marsh, “Flying Concellos” , Etching and Engraving, Date of Plate 1936, Edition of 100, 8 x 10 in. Collection of the Art Students League of New York

Reginald Marsh is one of the best known chroniclers of 1930s and 40s New York. It has been said that Marsh was to New York what Daumier was to Paris and Hogarth was to London. His paintings, drawings, and prints capture the aura and pace of the ever-changing city at a particularly exciting time in its history.

Marsh was fascinated with the seedier aspects of New York, and he was an obsessive explorer of the great metropolis. It was in places such as Coney Island, the burlesque parlors and dance halls of Fourteenth Street, the Bowery, the streets, and the subway that the Yale educated, financially comfortable Marsh found the subjects he was looking for – Bowery bums, burlesque queens, musclemen, bathing beauties, and streetwalkers. Marsh returned repeatedly to his favorite locations, usually working on the spot with sketchbooks and taking photographs that were used as the source material for completed works back in his Fourteenth Street studio.

Phil Greenwood

Phil Greenwood, “Morning Moon”, 1973, Lithograph, 40 x 47 cm, Private Collection

Phil Greenwood was born in Dolgellau, Wales, and studied at the Hornsey and Harrow Colleges of Art. He was taught by some of Britain’s finest contemporary artists – Ken Howard RA, Charles Bartlett RE, RWS and the late Christopher Saunders RA. After an initial career in teaching he became a full time printmaker in 1971 and has been exhibiting both nationally and internationally for the past forty years. He is widely acknowledged as one of the countries leading printmakers.

Phil’s extraordinary ability to capture and convey the atmosphere of a landscape is fundamental to his work. His economical use of colour is heavily belied by rich and vibrant pieces that are exquisitely designed. With quiet mystery he is able to portray both the complexity and simplicity of natures double-edged personality and beauty.

With work hanging in many private and public collections through out the world Phil regularly exhibits at the Royal Academy and the Bankside Gallery. He has also exhibited work at the British Embassy in Brussels, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Tate Gallery, London.

Henry Moore

Henry Moore, “Sheep”, Drawings, Lithographs and Sculptures

The sculptor Henry Moore saw a stark link between the rock that was both his material and inspiration, and the grazing calmness of sheep.  The animals stand out in the landscape in the same, oblique way, providing an aesthetic of both fitting in and being anomalous; they litter the vista in a way that is puzzling and warmly mysterious.

Roger Deakin, the English cinematographer,  saw this relationship himself when walking the Rhinogs where he writes of seeing that same relationship that sparked Moore’s fascination with sheep:  “I watched a ewe standing between two big rocks the shape of goat’s cheeses.  They were just far enough apart to allow the animal in, and I began to understand the relationship Henry Moore perceived between sheep and stones.  He saw sheep as animate stones, the makers of their own landscape.”

This permeable position between the maker and the made is perhaps what attracted the sculptor to the animal, leading him to produce a range of sketches in pen and ink (largely a ball-point pen in fact) that would make up his eventual 1980 publication, Henry Moore’s “Sheep Sketchbook”.

William Kentridge

William Kentridge, “Blue Head”, Etching and Aquatint with Two Hand-Painted Plates on Velin Arches Blanc Paper, 47 ¼ x 36 11/50 inches, 1993-1998, Edition of 35

Kentridge was born in 1955 into a wealthy Johannesburg family, descendants of Jewish refugees from the purges and pogroms of Russia and Europe. For generations the family had been deeply involved in politics and human rights issues in South Africa. Both his parents were lawyers, famous for their defense of victims of the apartheid.

In 1976, he attained a degree in Politics and African Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand after which he studied art at the Johannesburg Art Foundation until 1978. There, he met Dumile Feni whose drawings had a major impact on Kentridge’s work.

By the mid-1970s Kentridge was making prints and drawings. In 1979, he created 20 to 30 monotypes, which became known as the “Pit” series. In 1980, he executed about 50 small-format etchings which he called the “Domestic Scenes”. These two groups of prints served to establish Kentridge’s artistic identity, an identity he has continued to develop in various media including theater. Despite his ongoing exploration of non-traditional media, the foundation of his art has always been drawing and printmaking.

Walter Oltmann

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The Artwork of Walter Oltmann

Born in 1960 Walter Oltmann went to school and completed his Fine Arts Degree in Kwa-Zulu Natal. His father worked as a civil servant and the family moved between one remote area of Kwa-Zulu Natal to the next. This migratory life style exposed Walter Oltmann to the rich craft tradition of rural South Africa.

Oltmann recalls the rigorous training in drawing that university art students underwent at the time. Drawing skills were seen as a foundation to build the rest of one’s art making practice on.  His teachers “made it clear to us that drawing should be a regimen in one’s creative practice and also a way of thinking as an investigative activity”. The mastery of drawing skills has translated well into Oltmann’s interpretation of the mastery of traditional craft skills that are to be found in South Africa.

Walter Oltmann’s work can be divided into two main areas of practice: drawing (pencil, ink and bleach) and sculpture (wire work). He is a master at manipulating both two-dimensional and three-dimensional line. A thread runs through the prints that he made at The Artists’ Press: “While I have dabbled with lithography, this is my first real adventuring into it. The thread of the pencil line moves into wire which moves into polymer plate and then is transferred onto paper”.

The embossed quality of the letterpress printing gives an added tactile dimension to the work. The spirit of the wire work has translated well into print. The hand-made quality of the woven and knotted wire sculptures objectifies the aspect of time passing – the viewer grasps time as a tangible quality embodied in the material.  This aspect also carries over into the drawings and prints that Walter Oltmann makes.

Ernest Haeckel

Lithographs by Ernst Haeckel

“Kunstformen der Natur”, or “Art Forms in Nature”, encapsulates biologist Ernst Haeckel’s response to Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Haeckel  published these exquisitely rendered depictions of flora and fauna in ten installments of ten illustrations from 1899 to 1904, aiming to widen the general public’s understanding of naturalism.

Haeckel also clearly saw his illustrations as more than just scientific documentation. In introducing one of his plates, he wrote that its patterns would not be out of place in embroideries or on urns and bottles. Haeckel’s elaborate forms have been called a precursor to art nouveau, and his influence even stretched to architecture.

Rufino Tamayo

Three Works by Rufino Tamayo

The top image is a lithograph entitled “Perro / Dog”, 1973,  from a series of 15. The middle image is an oil painting entitled “El Comedor de Sandias / The Watermelon Eater”, 1941, one of many works Tamayo did on the subject. The bottom image is an oil on canvas, painted on the eve of the United States entry into World War One, entitled “Animals”, 1941, now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Bruce Nauman

Bruce Nauman, “Life Mask”, Lithograph, 1981,, 71.1 x 96.5 cm. Edition of 50, Private Collection

Bruce Nauman was one of the most prominent, influential, and versatile American artists to emerge in the 1960s. Although his work is not easily defined by its materials, styles, or themes, sculpture is central to it, and it is characteristic of Post-Minimalism in the way it blends ideas from Conceptualism, Minimalism, performance art, and video art.

The revival of interest in Marcel Duchamp in the 1960s also clearly influenced Nauman in various ways, from encouraging his love of wordplay to infusing his work with a satirical and sometimes absurdist tone. Despite the impact of Dada, however, he has continued to view his art less as a playful or creative enterprise than as a serious research endeavor, one he likes to carry out in seclusion from the art world, one that is shaped by his interests in ethics and politics.

The Fak Hongs

Artist Unknown,  Circa-1930 Stone lLthograph for the Magician Troupe  “The Fak Hongs”

In the first decades of the twentieth-century, a type of magic show known as the “Oriental Magician” was very popular. The early exploration of China at the turn of the century by Europeans provided material for practicing magicians to incorporate into their performances. A type of magic show known as the “Oriental Magician”, in which Western magicians donned stereotypical oriental attire, became very popular throughout Europe. 

One of these was the magician Fak Hong, a European who performed in Japanese robes and haircut similar to those of samurai warriors. Renowned throughout Europe during the 1920s and 1930s, his troupe, the Fak-Hongs”, dressed as Asian mystics and performed such magic as levitation and cutting women in half. 

Due to his show’s popularity, Fak Hong formed a second troupe which was led by the illusionist Chang, the stage name of Juan José Pablo Jesorum, a native of Panama. The two groups, now known collectively as “Chang and Fak-Hong’s United Magicians” successfully toured Europe, America, and South America. Several of their performances highlighted illusions such as “Invisible Man”, “Hari-Kari”, “Noah’s Ark”, and “Night in Tokyo”.