Sir Lionel Lindsay: Australia's Audubon

The prints of Sir Lionel Arthur Lindsay (1874 –1961) enrapture the eye and make us envy this lively and animated lines. The beauty of his black and white prints reflect the interest of the era of Australian printmakers who loved the elegant and velvety black of their inked up prints.

Lindsay was a highly regarded Australian artist and illustrator, known for his prints of natural world subjects. Some would call him the Audubon of Australia, but in truth, his skills and love of all subjects allowed him to exhibit a variety of imagery far beyond the descriptiveness of Audubon. His work was more about real life and the things one sees every day; although we who do not live in Australia would be hard-pressed to envision kangaroos and emus roaming about as being a normal part of our lives.

Jiri Anderle: The Czech Printmaker of Beautiful Evil

Jiří Anderle (b. 1936) is a Czech artist, originally from Pavlíkov, Rakovnicko. Anderle faced oppression in the making of his work, and he fought through the era of the Iron Curtain to produce a large body of prints, paintings and drawings which has received international acclaim. Fortunate for us, his work has been exhibited globally and is included in numerous museum collections.

Anderle’s evidently looked at the Old Masters, borrowing a thing or two from the excellent, detailed still lives and seductive portraits of Caravaggio. He has utilized his great drawing skills to portray portraits of young Renaissance-period women, youthful clad in elegant gowns and hair plaited with ribbons and pearls.They exude an aura of innocence and purity. Yet, there lies and undercurrent of something beyond their facade. No maiden could be so untouched, could she?

He contrasts these women with his later, more abstracted style of portraiture which is clearly influenced by Dubuffet, Klee and Bacon. Their facial and figural surfaces are butchered, nearly extinguished, yet their emotional/physical impact leaves the viewer with the feeling they have truly seen someone evil. One is reminded of the sickeningly ugly faces of Nolde and the German Expressionists who tore away the mask of civility to reveal Mankind’s truer nature. Anderle gives us a hint of that, and scrapes away the flesh of his subjects to reveal a complex interior system of hoses and pipes and chaos. We don't see the figures for the chaos of what's pouring out from their interiors.

The family portrait above looks a lot like the work of fellow printmaker Mauricio Lasansky. The faces are detail but everything else is left undone. He gives us what we need to see. Nothing more.

Throughout his work the drawn line is revered, and the polar contrasts of good and evil are presented in classically drawn faces imposed upon composed surfaces of emptiness. The portraits are virtually complete, yet he lets the faces evolve and change in a serial sort of passage of time. In contrast to the elegance of his drawn line, the edges of Anderle’s images appear to be eaten away, eroded and corroded. They break us from whatever narrative he tried to imbue upon the image, and tear us away back to the surface’s edge. They stop us from delving into the composition and make us explore the irregular edge of things, the breakup of the world. These images are indicative of the state of Man, our want to see beautiful things, but in the end they show the reality of our society’s unending need to destroy everything.

The more abstract images are harder to look at, morbid, in fact, but look we must. For they tell us about our own truer destructive nature, and foretell our own demise. Anderle’s work is not bleak or somber. It is sometimes dually ugly and inviting. Whatever Anderle chooses to depict, he invites us to look. We can’t help ourselves. It’s like trying to eat just one of your favorite mom's freshly baked chocolate chip cookies that she just took out of the oven. You can’t eat just one. You have to have more and more until you are sick to your stomach. Not trying to equate Anderle’s work with food per se, but it does compel us to look at it, ingest it, savor it, and then spit it back out. His beautifully evil work can be addictive. It should be. Take a look for yourselves, my inked up friends. Anderle makes certain there is enough for everyone's taste.

Jiri Anderle lives and works in Prague, the Czech Republic.

Facts:
1955-1961 – studied at the School of Applied Arts and the Academy of Fine Arts, in Prague.
1961-1969 - member of the Black Theatre of Prague.
1964 - Marries Milada, a fellow member of the Black Theatre company.
1968 – USA exhibition debut, works with Jacques and Anne Baruch Gallery, Chicago.
1981– awarded Grand Prix at International Biennial of Prints, Ljubljana.
1982 - exhibited at the Biennale di Venezia. Print retrospective at the National museum, Stockholm.
1995 - Retrospective at the National Gallery, Prague.
2008 - Largest USA retrospective of Anderle's prints at Cincinnati Art Museum.
2006 - awarded the Medal of Merit III.

100 - solo exhibitions throughout the world

Selected Public Collections:
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, UC, Berkeley, California, USA
Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris, France
California College of the Arts, San Francisco, California, USA
Centre Pompidou, Paris, France
Czech Museum of Fine Arts, Prague, Czech Republic
Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan, USA
Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin, Italy
The Jewish Museum, New York, New York, USA
Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York, USA
Musee d’Art Moderne, Brussels, Belgium
Musee des Beaux-Arts, Liege, Belgium
Musee National d’Histoire et d’Art, Luxembourg
Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje, Macedonia
Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York, USA
Narodni galerie v Praze (The National Gallery in Prague), Czech Republic
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, USA
Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Sweden
Slovenska narodna galeria (Slovak National Gallery), Bratislava, Slovakia
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy
USC Fisher Museum of Art, USC, Los Angeles, California, USA
Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England
World Print Council, San Francisco, California, USA

Elizabeth Dove Prints:On Tactile Remembrance and Being Human

Elizabeth Dove's prints and photographs take the viewer on a journey some of us may not want to make. Yet, there is a honesty in their openness which quickly changes the viewer's mind to decide this journey may be worth the effort and something we can all relate to.

Dove  uses objects like wishbones, hair, ladders, stitching, words and letters from dictionaries and writings from hers and others' journals to conduct a visual search for what it is to be human. This journal series uses her own body as a canvas; the basis for all the things going on in her mind, and in her own world of experience, to try to make sense of what obviously confuses us all - life, hope, fear, joy, and loss. The  image above is from Dove's "First Year" project relating to becoming a mother and the things one's body goes through in having a child - fluctuations in the body itself as it expands, contracts, hormonal swings, stitching it back together.

I am intrigued with her previous "Tabula" series(pictured above), which looks like clusters of red blood cells and the scarification of one's own skin, stitched ladders doubling as chromosome strains and rope knots -intact and cut off - which would suggest her hope for what becomes "The First Year".

Dove exaggerates the flesh tone of her skin to the a blood red, to emphasize what is beneath the skin, what keeps us living and what connects us as human beings. The realization of the series is a complete intermingling of blood cells on the composition and her son's footprints on Tabula V.

A more recent series entitled, "But I Don't Know Why..." is about a significant loss, unfinished conversations and questions without answers. This series resonates such an open wound of the artist that it may be hard for the viewer to see, but it speaks a topic most of us have also experienced.  Dove has written notes and thoughts from her journals on her own body and photographed them for all to see. The jumbled, rambling effect this creates re-emphasizes the thoughts one has after such a profound loss, the things one keeps inside their heads, ruminating conversations and reliving the grief over and over, trying to make sense of what will never be understood.

Dove is making hard, solid work. There are some visual associations with artists like Kiki Smith, Andres Serrano, and artists who use ink and paint to cover one's body (however those are often for political/erotic purpose), but Dove's not speaking as an outside observer to someone else's tragedy, design ideas or eroticism. She's putting herself out there for everyone to see, using her own thoughts and body for her work.And in a period where art seems to speak of the absurdity and media splash of cut up animals in formaldehyde and ill-conceived performance, Dove's work will have a lasting impact and an audience that grows to appreciate the human element her ideas and their execution.

Lynn Newcombe's Metal-Lovin' Prints

At first glance, Lynn Newcombe's etchings make a bold splash of black expressionist/constructivist line. The Vermont artist's compositions are solely comprised of black line versus white space, and little else. And gosh darn it, they're some mighty fine prints!

As her website attests, Newcombe works interchangeably between her metal sculpture and her etchings. http://www.lynnnewcombvt.com/ The linear components of the sculptures vary a bit, but the etchings are on task with describing buildings, bridges and other partially constructed pieces, which could be inspired by building block maquettes, or a Richard Serra sculpture.

The piece above is called "Jabberwock" and resembles an abstracted bridge tower. These  prints' closest visual relative  would appear to be the mammoth bridge and stone etching series of Piranesi.

There's a similar love of scale and massive weight of the subject as portrayed in Piranesi's work, but Newcombe takes them a step further toward 20th c. art and they compare very well to the brushwork of a certain  painter named Franz Kline. So much so, in fact, that they made me want to go back and look up some of Kline's paintings and revel anew in the power of his swift, decisive stroke.

I am also loosely reminded of Jim Dine's etched tool series with his history of mark-making and re-working the plates. There is a visible connection, but one finds Newcombe's forcefully rich black strokes even more seductive and engaging within their confined spaces.

Newcombe bends the drawn, etched line as well as she compels her metallic pieces. The woman loves metal. She says of her etchings..."My work is classical, in the tradition of Rembrandt, Piranesi, and Degas....My interest lies in creating what one may call layered prints, prints in which the viewer has the sensation of looking into and through the blacks."
Yes, we do see through her blacks in their varying densities, and we see depth and strength and a person who know how to handle line both as a spatial tool and as a record of human movement, touch and presence.    I want for nothing in seeing them, and  implore her to make more for our viewing pleasure. 

Jonathan Metzger's Reconstructing a New History for Man

What happens after the fall of Man or after a War? Reconstruction, of course. It has been the way of the world from time immemorial. Men, with their swords, horses, guns, arrows and bombs, blast the hell out of each other, and after everyone is tired of playing the game of 'Annihilation', the tired, weary warriors limp home, lick their wounds and figure out how to re-group and re-strike, or they go home and try to reconstruct their past lives.Whether they be men, or boys acting like men, this is a constant international past-time, and one that has real consequences when the boys 'grow up'.

Metzger is describing an activity 'boys' frequently do prior to growing up. They play make believe. Here, we see them playing in a field, where the grass has long worn away. In it, we see rocks and twigs, sticks and a discarded tennis shoe. The ground has been 'staked off' with sticks thrust upright into the ground, creating a sort of demarcation line. Meanwhile the boys are hard at work. They have gathered more of  sticks and are making a makeshift lean-to, or building some sort of shelter. The boys are dirty, and grimy from their labors. They are intent on their task. They are constructing their own universe, a new history for themselves and will defend it to the death. Such is the way of boys and men....

The surrounding blackness which encircles them could either be a thicket of twigs or a cave that they are building the shelter in, or it could also be a billowing cloud of dust from their activity - like the one forever shadowing "Pig Pen" in the Charlie Brown cartoons. Both options seem likely.

In the distance, there are glimpses of houses and more stable, grown up structures, but the boys are intent on creating their own. They are in their imaginary world of survival, and will go on constructing their universe until a call from Mom lets them know dinner is ready. All this reminds me how my cousins and I used to do the same things with our Tonka Trucks and a pile of earth. All of it was serious, and important, and we knew that if we were to move that pile of earth we had to work together. We were so grown up back then, and knew how the world worked.

Stretching this a bit, the same attitude could be said of the Wall Streeters and Occupy movement currently running around this country. There is no 'war' afoot, but there is unrest. People are participating together for the first time in decades in activities no different than these boys - trying to build shelters and making their own voices heard, making their own little universes in public parks, and civic centers. It is serious and grass-roots and taken on with the same enthusiasm of these two boys in 'their survival world'. The real world hasn't ended yet, but if it does crash and burn, the boys and the occupy-ers will know how to start over - with their own two hands and their ingenuity and their desire to make the world a better place.

Jason Scuilla's Foot Fetish Tickles Fancy

Two prints by Jason Scuilla at the MAPC show tickle my fancy. At first, they seem simple, almost unfinished images, where there is a lot of open plate area, and clean etched line. However, what brings an element of curiosity about his images is his play of scale and the subject. There are Enormous feet walking, dancing, flying through his landscapes! (I can hear Monty Python's theme song faintly running through my mind). 

These Feet, these colossal, massive feet, which look like chiseled, craggy and crumbling marble, are tip-toeing through the Italian landscape light as a feather. The absurdity of it makes me laugh. The rest of Scuilla's spare compositions lays bare witness that such a humorous thing is actually happening, and  here they are, feet effortlessly crossing the terrain, toes barely tickling the ground. Surely a colossal statue, which should be attached to such manner of said feet, would be crushing the ground and anything else beneath them, but then we break from Scuilla's vision.

Scuilla's  prints resemble old book plates torn from an ancient text. Then low and behold, one sees that Scuilla www.jasonscuilla.com refers to his time spent studying ancient Roman culture. The subject of these two prints, 'io lo vidi' and 'arto fantasma' springs from Scuilla's interest in imagining the colossal statue fragment of the Roman emperor Nero's foot in the Domus Aureas. His playful imaginings of these  metatarsals amuses us and makes us question what is real. With just these two feet, he also shows Nero to be the mad emperor we always have envisioned; he romps through the city of Rome on his self-indulgent quests. He [Nero] is unconcerned with the damage he can inflict upon the landscape and the city as he merrily hops along - like one of the balloons in Monty Python.

We know this was a painful era in ancient Rome's past, but Scuilla lets us be as one with the emperor and gleefully survey the Tuscan land. If the 'shoe' fits....