Woodblock Wednesday - japonisme, and a surprising green

Slight diversion at home while I try out some background textures for another project -

 quick print -

 more cutting, and doing some rubbings -

 cross-hatched background, quite violent to do! -

 yet another combination of loopy ribbon shapes with gouged texture -

Special treat at the class - a talk on Japonisme by Marie-Therese Barrett

The stylistic features that she pointed out were excellent "verbal handles" to use for thinking about what is (or isn't) going on in our own prints, from an aesthetic or compositional view rather than from the process aspect -

no depth, flat colours, outlines
patterns that emphasise the picture plane
cropping created by the frame as a decorative effect
treatment of space - exaggerated viewpoint, uptilted diagonals, strong asymmetrical foreground
changing viewpoints
the 2D picture space as a flat surface to which writing can be added

This two-sided accordion book, brought along by Marie-Therese, shows how each layer of colour changes the print -

  ...as does this one. I was intrigued by the "crow" - which turns out to be a piece of cloth! -

New to me - Henri Riviere's prints of the construction of the Eiffel Tower, at the height of the Japonisme delerium -

 And then to work. Printing  the textured blocks with "indigo" -

 ... and yellow ... the block still had the blue pigment, so it became this vibrant green -

 The morning's results included blue and yellow layers on the 4-layer block -

Half term next week - I have another project that needs a lot of cutting...

Start the week

When you get up at 6am and the sky looks like this -

it seems a good idea to turn on the the background lighting, rather than the computer ...

The  temporary standing desk has been in place for over a year;
it has led to much less computer time

The weekend had been full of art and family and food -

but no gardening (too cold!)  ...  and given the (over)growth here -

April 2019

April 2018

a little TLC and pruning wouldn't go amiss. That's on the schedule for this week.

Unusually, I started the week not just with hard-copy magazine reading in the bath

which is informative about Georgian cuisine and made me look up Barbare Jorjadze (1833-1895), author of a comprehensive cookbook and Georgia's first feminist.

... but also (to further ease myself into the week) an hour of sitting on the sofa with a big mugof coffee and the Guardian's Art Weekly email, reading story after story....

... thinking about going to Wakefield to see a new garden ... and the Hepworth, and the Sculpture Park

... intrigued by Edmund de Waal's latest installation(s), in Venice ("studying the language of exile")

... fence-sitting in regard to Helvetica, which needed a redesign for legibility on small screens

... loving the video about the windmill, and the Ukranian Easter egg designs, and the pix of Cuban cinemas

Best article was the one arguing that British painting originated in the drawing of a flea; it was possibly a bit more complicated than that, but there's a lot to be said about the intersection of science and art. And it was news to me that Robert Hooke (1635-1703) started his working life as an apprentice to Peter Lely (1618-1680), and "his talent for drawing never left him". Truly, looking down a primitive microscope and rendering something never seen before must have been extraordinary, even for a polymath in an age of scientific ferment.

Painted faces, close up

After looking long and hard at the Vuillard exhibition (a few of the 500 paintings he made of his mother), we turned to the permanent display at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, which has a little of everything, not overwhelming in size but a good survey of the history of painting. 

The light on the paint texture got me looking closely at how faces were painted ... here are a few from the 18th, 17th, 16th centuries. 

And here's the 19th century painting that got me looking, and paying attention to the informative text on the labels:

"the portrait is unfinished, especially its rapidly-improvised landscape"

ah yes, those brush marks

 The "boldly painted figure is resolved enough to demonstrate the impact Manet made as a provocative painter of modern life subjects" -

but "the boldly painted figure" is resolved

Comparing his use of provocative paint with that of Renoir's impressionist palette and techniques was what promoted the series of close-ups - 

Myths that inform architecture

The Ziggurat of Belus at Babylon (via)

One of the short talks at "RIBA late" referred to Lethaby's 1891 book on the stories behind elements of architecture. The book is still in print, and also available in e-form, from this site.

The table of contents gives the types of stories Lethaby finds told in architecture:

 1. The world fabric
 2. The microcosmos
 3. Four square
 4. At the centre of the earth
 5. The jewel-bearing tree
 6. The planetary spheres
 7. The labyrinth
 8. The golden gate of the sun
 9. Pavements like the sea
10. Ceilings like the sky
11. The windows of heaven and the 360 days
12. The symbol of creation

The stories behind the ziggurat frontispiece appear on p.127 - in the chapter on the seven planetary spheres. Ziggurats were built by the Chaleans, to "imitate the mythical mountain of the assembly of the stars" and served both as a sanctuary and as an observatory for the stars. Rather than temples, these are "Mounts of Paradise - terraced altars".

This ziggurat was described by Herodotus as an enclosure two furlongs square, with gates of solid brass; the tower was a furlong each way at the base, with a resting place and seats halfway up the path that winds around it.

Lethaby's drawing is based on dimensions found on a tablet; the ziggurat is, he says, a majestic an myserious suggestion of volume and stability.

The seven spheres, belonging to the seven planets, each have their own colour in the Chaldean system - the sun golden, the moon silver, distant Saturn black, Jupiter orange, Mars red, Venus pale yellow, Mercury deep blue. Whereas in "the Mohammedan scheme" the spheres are composed of emerald, white silver, large white pearls, ruby, red gold, yellow jacinth, white shining light.

Another Islamic scheme of the seven spheres (explained here)

At a quick glance, the book is a treasure trove of symbolism and story. It is written in what we now might think of as a fusty Victorian style. No dumbing down for hapless readers; solid research, solidly presented for people wanting to know.

Italian Renaissance drawings: design, form, and function

A wonderful art history course that I'm doing at ...where else... City Lit. For seven weeks we get to sit and look at images and hear about the artist and the evolution and use of the drawing. The tutor gets discussion going with thought-provoking questions, and provides a comprehensive list of the works to be shown at the start of each class. Only problem is, the discussions mean we don't get to the end of the list! 

For instance, here's the painting resulting from Lorenzo Costa's drawing of the coronation of the Virgin - 

Note the saints looking up at the heavenly scene. (St Victor, St John the Baptist, St Augustine, St John the Evangelist, St Jerome and St Sebastian.) Why is one of the reading rather than looking? to show that "some people are non-believers and don't see a miracle when it happens before their eyes".

I have been collecting the image lists and taking notes and making sketches, and hope to review the material and find images of some of the drawings when things settle down a bit here. 

Short video featuring the course tutor is here.

Painting, engraving, authorship, and meaning - Magdalena de Passe

It's hard to imagine, from our image-saturated present day, how rarified access to art was, 500 years ago. Paintings were displayed in churches, and in the homes of the rich; such images were accessible elsewhere rarely if at all.

So it was collectors, and those involved in producing art, who had the most access to "pictures". And what were the pictures about? Religious themes (often including donor portraits), and depictions of myths. Starting in the 15th century Northern Renaissance, portraits of patrons became an important subject.

In the 16th century, Northern artists, mainly from the Netherlands (which by the way was being over-run by Spanish conquerors), brought back from Italy their own work influenced by the great Italian painters and currents in Italian art.

One such painter who went to live in Rome was the German Adam Elsheimer (1578-1610). He painted small-scale works on copper, and his influence comes from their translation into prints. The lighting effects in his work are remarkable, and Rubens struck up a friendship with him.

Another friend, at least at first, was Hendrick Goudt, who established his reputation with seven prints after Elsheimer at the start of the 17th century, and thereby publicised Elsheimer's work in northern Europe.

Elsheimer's Apollo and Coronis (26 x 32 cm): large-scale composition on a miniature level

Goudt must have shown his engravings, or possibly the original painting, to Magdalena de Passe, who produced her own engraving of a work known since 1951 as Apollo and Coronis. It is based on a story from Ovid's Metamorphoses, and was formerly thought to be of Cephalus and Procris - both stories involve jealousy and wife-killing.

Magdalena (1600-1638) was taught engraving by her father, Crispin de Passe, along with three of her brothers. The family was rooted in artistic circles - the mother was the niece of the painter Marten de Vos (d.1603; he had spent six years in Italy and brought the Venetian style to Antwerp). As Mennonites, Crispin and his family had had to move from Antwerp to Cologne to escape the Spanish and then to Utrecht. However, work they all did, producing more than 1400 engravings and 50 illustrated works.

Magdalena de Passe's engraving, 21 x 23 cm, with added text

The subject of painting and print (and hence their "meaning" or interpretation) had been contested, and the inscriptions below the image add further meanings, rooted in history. This work "bears all the characteristics of [the] singular and specialized mode of production [of engravings "after" paintings] ... she credits the painter in an elegant italic formula ... she includes a set of verses in Latin to sum up the moral implications of the scene ... she includes a dedication to a prestigious figure" says Stephen Bann in Nelson and Shiff, Critical Terms for Art History, 1996. "The work is enmeshed in a close texture of relationships which make it virtually impossible to separate out the stake of an individual authorship."

Bann compares literature and art - in literature, says the critic Harold Bloom, "there are no texts, but only relationships between texts", and the art historian Norman Bryson has extended this: "in the visual arts, tradition has an even more constraining effect because the image maker 'lacks access to any comparable flow (at least before the mass dissemination of imagery).'"

In the bottom left corner Magdalena put her own name and that of her father: "Magdalena Passaea Crisp. F. Fecit." Above that is a high-sounding dedication of the print, to the prince of Flemish painters, Rubens. The most significant northern exponent of the baroque, Rubens made Antwerp and Flanders the center of northern Italianate painting. The dedication is appropriate, as Rubens valued Elsheimer highly.

A 17th-century German painter, Joachim von Sandrart, warned of the limitations of engravings: by their very nature, they cannot achieve the "excellence" of paintings. (Around the time he wrote, engraving was being demoted from the "artistic" stratosphere, but that's another story.) Stephen Bann makes a case for Magdalena misinterpreting the painting. She has included four lines of Latin verse in a stylish italic hand, and these point out the dangers of ill-directed zeal and draw attention to the "unhappy Procris", who perished at the hands of her husband, or rather, by his javelin (which had been her gift to him as appeasement after a jealousy-producing incident). This is a confusion with the Apollo and Coronis story - Coronis perished from Apollo's impulsive act, again after a bout of jealousy, killed with an arrow - but Apollo, a healer (gathering herbs in the painting), saved their unborn son, who became the god of medicine, Aesculapius.

What is interesting about this mis-reading and mis-naming is that, in the light of the Latin verses, this engraving falls into a class of images espousing wifely virtue, and thus becomes appropriate for a marriage gift. Was Magdalena taking Goudt's title at face value, not bothering to check the details of the story, or was she looking to improve the saleability of the print among her Calvinist compatriots?

Bann hesitates to speculate on "the stake of this dutiful daughter ... in a representation of femininity which differs significantly from the one which Elsheimer intended ... the skillful craftswoman effaces herself behind the scene which she has patiently re-created in another medium."