Category: Prints and Printmaking
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Hiroshi Yoshida
Hiroshi Yoshida devoted the first part of his career to painting. In his late 40’s he moved into woodblock printing and became one of the major artists of the “shin hanga” (“new print”) movement. Yoshida was one of the first major woodblock printers in Japan to step outside the traditional separation of skills in which…
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Anders Zorn
As an art student, with an art student’s typical financial state, I used to haunt the used bookstores in and around Philadelphia, looking for those occasional gems of great art books that I could somehow afford. At one point, I came across a ragged copy of a small catalog of prints called Prints of Distinction,…
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Whistler’s Etchings
I’ll do a general post about James Abbot McNeill Whistler at some point, but for this one I want to concentrate on his etchings. In the general sense, suffice it to say that if your only familiarity with Whistler is his rather staid profile portrait of his mother sitting in a chair (Arrangement in Grey…
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Belinda Del Pesco
Belinda Del Pesco is a watercolorist from California who has a terrific blog, Belinda Del Pesco Fine Art, in which she not only posts her work, but describes her working methods along with images of the work in progress. She has the kind of approach to watercolor that I admire: clear and fresh color built…
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Kawase Hasui
Kawase Hasui was a Japanese printmaker, active in the first half of the 20th century, who created wonderfully subtle and entrancingly beautiful woodblock prints of landscape scenes. His images were sometimes brimming with light and the brilliant colors of Spring or Autumn at other times almost monochromatic, depicting scenes at night, twilight or in the…
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M.C. Escher
M.C. Escher’s visions of strange worlds, impossible objects, and incredible tesselations form an extraordinary bridge between art and mathematics. Critics often revile Escher and try to dismiss him as a creator of “decorative patterns” and “visual tricks”; and of course, he can’t possibly be a great artist because he’s (ugh!) popular with the (gasp!) masses!…