Link to Post:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113093/jacques-callot-artist-who-brought-printmaking-its-heights
Jed Perl reviews the recent exhibition Princes & Paupers: The Art of Jacques Callot at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.
Perl begins: "Rarely have life’s sweetness and bitterness been embraced with more evenhanded genius than in the work of Jacques Callot. The seventeenth-century French printmaker finds an ethics of vision—a way of grappling with whatever the world has to offer—in the indomitable force and lucidity of his line. Revered from his own day down to ours by those who see possibilities for transcendence in the printmaker’s technical know-how, Callot has nevertheless been a fairly minor figure in the art history books, no matter that some of his impressions of the horrors of war are as indelible as Goya’s and that his reflections on the pleasures of the theater and the fairground rival those of Rubens and Watteau. Within the frequently Lilliputian dimensions of his prints—some of the most famous ones are little more than two inches high—Callot represented beggars, gypsies, soldiers, actors, and the ladies and gentlemen of the court."
Link to Post:
http://notesonlooking.com/2013/02/the-reticence-of-the-artist-the-anticipation-of-the-questioner-mario-correa-and-geoff-tuck/
An extended correspondence between Geoff Tuck and painter Mario Correa on the occasion of Correa's recent exhibition at Redling Fine Art, Los Angeles.
Correa remarks: "Though much of my recent work has utilized print making techniques, I don’t have any training or expertise in printmaking; what I like about it is it’s physicality (I print by hand) and I like to think that my naivete allows for some diy ingenuity, or wrongness in printmaking can make rightness in painting… I’ve got a group of paintings made by painting on wine bottles and then wrapping and wringing canvas over them, and another group is made by painting through a blank silk screen, the screen clogs as I go, making it’s own marks until its no longer useful. You asked who figured as precedents in this way of working, I would say Sigmar Polke, Llyn Foulkes (Foulkes’ show at the Hammer is great), and Lari Pitman were my first heroes for unconventional painting processes, then Christopher Wool was a gateway to many more… Simon Hantai and David Hammons got me thinking about prints… they all have a unique relationship to the artist’s hand, it’s there and not there."
Link to Post:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2013/jan/13/morandi-lines-poetry-review-giorgio
Laura Cumming previews the exhibition Morandi: Works on Paper at the Estorick Collection, London, on view from January 16 - April 7, 2013.
Cumming writes that Morandi "is not known for his lines. Rather the opposite: in the hazy world of his painted still lifes, everything appears muzzy and soft. The famous objects appearing on the miniature stage of his table – the bottles, bowls, decanters and jugs – do so in something as hazy as limelight. You would not expect to look deep into these masterpieces of 20th-century art and see a sharp edge, an outline or anything as concise as a dot... The lines build up in meshes and weaves, steady, patient and strikingly judicious. It's as if he daren't rush it – this is an etching after all, where one false mark can lead to endless problems. But going through the show, you see that Morandi's graphic gifts are so subtle he is able to get over the finest variations of atmosphere, tone and light just through infinitely small variations in the direction of the crosshatchings. It's like a slight change of breeze, shifting the mood and the weather."
Link to Post:
http://www.artwrit.com/article/wade-guyton-os-at-the-whitney-museum/
Tom McGlynn reviews the exhibition Wade Guyton OS at the Whitney Museum, New York, on view through January 13, 2012.
McGlynn writes: "The work displayed on the museum’s third floor includes painting, sculpture and collage and if one ran through and peripherally scanned the ensemble it might well serve as a survey of “triumphant” American art ranging chronologically from abstract expressionism to post-painterly abstraction to minimalism. Barnett Newman’s Stations of the Cross cycle immediately comes to mind in one of Guyton’s large series of black, inkjet-printed, stretched-linen panels. The rhetoric of the screen grab, scanner and ink jet printer displaces the humane existential stance of Newman’s work." McGlynn continues: "Guyton’s work contains many of the formal elements that I enjoy in a peculiarly American visual rhetoric from Stuart Davis to Christopher Wool. These include slab-like lateral color, generic quotidian fragments, ridiculous scale, open-ended rhythmic composition, parallax optics, sloppy paint application, etc. The problem I had with achieving a fresh view of Guyton’s work was that the clear influences of Davis, Noland, Kelly, Martin, Stella, Warhol, were never fully synthesized into a newer aesthetic that might define the artist as a 'strong poet' in the present."
Link to Post:
http://slowmuse.wordpress.com/2012/10/25/the-guyton-files/
Deborah Barlow posts selections from an ongoing conversation on Jerry Saltz's Facebook page about the exhibition Wade Guyton: OS at The Whitney Museum, New York, on view through January 13, 2013.
There are nearly 800 responses to Jerry Saltz's comment: "Last week some of you claimed that Wade Guyton’s paintings aren’t paintings. Some called them “prints” or “mono-types” or other things. Some said they’re not art at all because “he doesn’t touch them.” (In fact he’s perpetually tending & tugging the linen as it comes out of the printer.) In regards to categories like painting: Dislocations, adjustments, ruptures, and expansions are always happening. Always have. Always will. Let go of the neatness of identification (see Plato’s Cave). Painting doesn’t need anyone’s protection. Like love, let painting do what it does. Or not."
Link to Post:
http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2012/08/working_with_el.html
Jeff Jahn interviews Mark and Rae Mahaffey about printmaking with painter Ellsworth Kelly on the occasion of the exhibition Ellsworth Kelly/Prints at the Portland Art Museum through September 16, 2012.
Jahn notes that Kelly's "forms are sourced from real life, first carefully observed, then captured in photos and lastly distilled until nothing but the form transforms Ellsworth's own personal subjective experience into something more universal. It is as if Kelly has taken an Epicurian impulse (it is obvious he knows something about enjoying life) and somehow found a way to make into a distillate that others can translate with their eyes."
Link to Post:
http://newamericanpaintings.wordpress.com/2012/06/21/in-the-studio-qa-with-susanna-bluhm/
Amanda Manitach interviews painter Susanna Bluhm about her work currently on view in the exhibition look at the crown with which his mother crowned him at Prole Drift, Seattle, Washington, through July 14, 2012.
Manitach writes that Bluhm's "new work at Prole Drift cites the darker passages of the Song of Solomon and comprises fifteen prints pulled from a single plate that's been etched with images of an infant's incubator, breathing tubes, little foxes, twigs, creeping ivy and bottles of milk. The prints themselves are wildly different, having been inked or wiped with varying degrees of thickness, then collaged or painted over."
Link to Post:
http://lacma.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/hendrik-goltzius-a-mannerist-with-an-exuberant-touch/
Hylan Booker blogs about the paintings and engravings of Hendrik Goltzius.
Although known for his printmaking, Booker notes that the "the sensuous and decadent allegorical themes would find bold expression in [Goltzius'] paintings, which he took up in his middle age. His extraordinarily sensitive sense of detail gives one the feeling that here's an artist using a brush with the same ease as he wielded the burin, his steel engraving tool."
Link to Post:
http://youtu.be/3TXM2wwUGrc
James Kalm visits the exhibition Nicole Eisenman, Woodcuts, Etchings, Lithographs and Monotypes at Leo Koenig, New York, on view through June 30, 2012.
Kalm notes that "this show reveals an abiding attachment and pursuit of, the grand tradition of classic printmaking. While the monotypes display a very painterly sensibility. Eisenman's etchings and lithographs highlight the artists wonderful facility with line and tone."
Link to Post:
http://lacma.wordpress.com/2012/05/21/whistlers-etchings-an-art-of-suggestion/
Naoko Takahatake blogs about the exhibition Whistler’s Etchings: An Art of Suggestion at LACMA, on view through July 22, 2012.
Takahatake writes: "Whistler was disparaged as 'an artist of incomplete performance,' his Venice etchings having been 'done with a swiftness and dash that preclude anything like care and finish.'While many of the prints on view are indeed seemingly spontaneous in execution, at times resembling preliminary studies taken from life, Whistler continuously reworked his plates, fastidiously redefining details and often reinforcing areas of shading to compensate for the wear of the plate. His economy of means belies his great expense of labor."
