Category: Prints and Printmaking

The Society of Wood Engravers is a U.K. organization devoted, as the name states, to the art of wood engraving. Though similar in many ways to the more familiar process of woodcuts, of which it is a subset, wood engraving shares similarity to the process of metal engraving in the nature of the tools used.…

18th Century Venetian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi was famous for his elaborate engravings of the fantastic architectural ruins of Rome. He is even more well known for a set of 14 copper plate etchings titled Carceri (“Prisons”). These are architectural fantasies, “capricious inventions” as they are described on the title page. Their monumental size, grand…

I’ve written before about the beautiful etchings of James McNeill Whistler, whose work as an etcher is even less well known than his paintings. On Beauty and the Everyday: The Prints of James McNeill Whistler is a new exhibition opening this Saturday, August 21, 2010, at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, which has…

Lisa Brawn is a Canadian artist working in the medium of woodcut. Unusual enough these days, she adds several elements to the process that make it even more unique. One is her choice of wood. Woodcut a painstaking relief printmaking process in which the “negative” areas, those not to be printed, are carved away leaving…