august - show n tell salon

Saturday August 12th Stephanie Leedy opened her building for the ever popular Show and Tell event. Nine collectors shared stories about TWO inked works from their personal collections.  Seventeen enjoyed the informal program by the Nelson Atkins Print Society. 

Double click to enlarge images.

 
"Artist Statement by Ben Beres. This etching has tiny words and sentences that do not make any sense. Even after ten minutes of study the content is unintelligible. I think that is the point Beres is trying to make about artist statements. I love this piece."  Paul Sokoloff

More on Ben Beres here

Curtis Smith shared a two color lithograph by the Italian print maker Alda Fana 

"Giuseppe Vasi modified the dress of people on his etched plates for the purpose of tourism." David Mc Gee    

 

 For more about Vasi the etcher.

Susan Lawrence and Charlie Paynter presented collaboration work by Ben Shahn and Leonard Baskin. Entitled "Beatitudes."  It was a print from her parents.

Etcher Andre Zorn is known for his particular style using parallel lines. Steve Pruitt

When I participated in the 2011 Exchange #3 black and white prints through Lets Trade Prints, I received twenty-two other inked works from Australia, France, Russia, Canada, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Illinois, Wisconsin, Washington, Maryland, and California. In the post was the lino cut, River Bank by Elizabeth Burton from Queensland, Australia. Karl Marxhausen

John Mallery showed us a high-end archival box for prints, above.

"Maritime etchings of Arthur Briscoe came from his first-hand experiences on the sea." John Mallery

 "In the lithograph Nemesis by Austin Osman Spare, the artist depicts signals from the unconscious mind. At the bottom of the print you can see the nose of the dreamer, above which is a portrait of the artist. Some called Spare the father of surrealism." Paul Sokoloff

Passing around an illumined magnifying glass, members studied the fine details of boxwood engravings by Thomas Berwick. The Newcastle map and photos also were passed around.

 

"Many of his hard wood engravings appeared in children's books. Berwick learned the trade in from the Newcastle engraver Ralph Bailey. Berwick walked the three mile route everyday and you can walk the same route today when you are in Newcastle. I have." Paula Winchester

"My son David was in fifth grade when he did this lino cut impressions for the haunted house challenge. He must have spent twenty minutes cutting on this lino cut block every evening. He got help from our neighbor Russell Ferguson." Curtis Smith

A lithography by Elizabeth Layton

 
Seven minutes. Part 1
Don Lambert related his encounters with Elizabeth Layton

"Elizabeth did a drawing called Censored. Where she has been censored. Her principles have been crossed out. Inspired by the drawing, she did this lithograph. This was produced by The Lawrence Lithography Workshop, that is Mike Sims in Kansas City. It was done in edition of one hundred and they all sold." Don Lambert

 
Two minutes. Part 2. Layton's print "Remembering Names," next.

"They are all our children now, she said. In other words, when you are a mother and you lost a child, you understand what every mother goes through in a tragic time like this." Don Lambert

After I saw the woodblocks Herschel Logan carved out at the Beach Museum of Art in Manhattan, Kansas - I learned by trying it myself. Designs drawn first, next cuts on a linoleum block. The largest learning curve for me was inking twenty-three impressions that looked alike.[check LINK] What a headache!! The result was my lino cut called Moss Creek #1. I tried to do a sky like J.J. Lankes might do. Karl Marxhausen

 

Steve Pruit shared lithograph by Childe Haasam (1859-1935), after the series of Flag paintings.

show and tell event, 
August 12, 2017

karl marxhausen - print share

Photographer Karl Marxhausen held up a favorite woodcut at the Creative Cafe and shared the difficulty of the cutting and inking process. Double click on images to enlarge details.

 

"It began with my love for "a wisp." The way the thin graphite strokes described faint sunlight coming through the cloud."

"The thinnest lines in a woodcut are the darkest black. The whole design becomes something more than a gray scale drawing. After all the days it takes to cut a design onto the block, the inking and the proofing, it takes me just as long to embrace what I see with my eyes. A woodcut cannot hold soft lines like the light touch of graphite can."

"The tiptop of the trees are so skinny on the block, they hold a little amount of printer's ink. The hand-burnishing from the back side of the paper needs to be both gentle and deliberate. If that area is missed, then the details I want will be absent."

Six minute video showed inking a woodcut block with a brayer. Aligning the proof sheet with the inked block. Methodical burnishing by hand. Pulling a proof. And removing the water-based ink with a paper towel. (courtesy of the artist)

"There is a lot of guessing and planning that one works at. In my "Limb Over Snow Houses" I filled the sky with dashes, inspired by the work of C.A. Seward. It wasn't in the original drawing. It worked out amazingly well. I especially enjoy the graphic boldness and poetry of the tree trunk."

Hi, Karl, I wanted to send you a note thanking you for sharing your 2 prints today at the "show & tell." I was glad you passed them around so we could get a closer look at them. They were really quite wonderful! Keep up the good the work!
Ruthie Osa

Karl Marxhausen is a member of the Nelson Atkins Print Society. He takes photos for the Spotlight KC Print blog when he can. Members are encouraged to send their photos to karl@marxhausen.net along with their observations and comments related to all our events. See more of the plein air drawings from which his woodcuts were based at
http://karl-marxhausen.blogspot.com/2015/01/fresh-powder.html
Drop him an email to get his monthly newsletter. He keeps an art blog, the Moss Creek Journal http://karl-marxhausen.blogspot.com  Cheers.

print share - richard hamilton

At the Creative Cafe members shared stories about the print they brought with them from home. Double click on images to see details enlarged.

Six minutes.

"This one is interesting, from the standpoint of this presents I think one of the first use of plate toning," said Richard Hamilton during the Print Salon Share at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art. "Which is where the artist wipes the plate.  Here he wiped the top but he did not wipe this bottom area to keep that dark and anchored. Of course this guy is with his mule, probably mule-horse, and I believe he is plowing somewhere on the outskirts of Paris."

 Drypoint by Jean Francoise Raffaelli.

It measured 4 5/8 by 6 inches.

One minute.
He made a total of 184 prints. Jean Francoise Raffaelli did not consider himself an impressionist. He considered himself to be a naturalist. And later a follower of Zola, who was an avant garde writer.

Richard Hamilton is a member of the Nelson Atkins Print Society.

print share - paula winchester

When 40 Nelson Atkins print society members got together to share a print that meant something to each of us,







STORIES opened up, and it got exciting in the Creative Cafe of the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art. 


Member Paula Winchester spoke about visiting her son in Portland and shared her wood engraving by Paul Gentry. Double click on images to enlarge.

Three minutes. 

Paula shared:

"This is a little bit that I know about this person. Paul Gentry. He lives in Portland, Oregon. My son also lives there and works at Nike World headquarters. So I tried to find him, but I was only traveling by mass transit and he was beyond where I could travel."

"But (Gentry) he calls himself a wood engraver. And he started in 2001, so he hasn't been doing this for very long. And wood engraving, this is for me to know as long as you don't know as well, is different from woodcuts, in that they are made on blocks of "end grain hardwood" rather than the face of a board. He also makes his own boards. So this harder surface allows one to cut a very fine design with engraving tools."

"He lives in the Willamette Valley, and he has become over time, basically he is a pictorial realistic division. And he loves the land, and that which he lives in. So his artwork is going to be things that appeal to me. And I like landscapes and things having to do with nature."

"To produce a print usually takes several weeks of work. He usually does not do much more than thirty-five prints. He fabricates these blocks themselves from pieces of eastern maple which are glued together and then carefully milled and sanded. And then the interesting thing is that when he does these prints he uses a "bamboo rice spoon" which he gets from the kitchen. The bamboo rice spoon is his burnishing tool to get it pressed into the print."

  

"That's about what I know. I know the American Legacy Gallery still has these things. And there was this rather nice one that I thought was really cool that had trees, cows, and horses. And (Gentry) he also did one that the American Legacy Gallery picked to be a part of the Print Crawl last year. One that he had that I thought was really cool, and that was not nature-oriented, but... if you have ever been to Portland, it has ridge after ridge after ridge after ridge, and it was like looking through ridges underneath the bridges and there was a person walking." 
         

John Mallery: That one was actually called "Shadows and Steel" and it is actually in the Nelson collection.

Marilyn Carbonell: The Nelson has three of them. Three Paul Gentries.

Steve Pruitt: And why, why do they have three Paul Gentries, Marilyn?

Marilyn Carbonell: Someone donated.

"Reflections At Ankeny" by Paul Gentry, wood engraving

Paula Winchester is a member of the Nelson Atkins Print Society. Her website is http://www.paulawinchester.com/. More on Winchester's experimenting with monoprints, click http://spotlightkcprint.blogspot.com/2013/03/paula-winchester-kc-printmaker.html