Art Werger's Glittering Cityscapes

The work of Art Werger is stunningly perfect and makes the rest of us go, "Man, he is just too good!" Yes, he is good, more than good. He is a master at this work, and loves it, obviously.

Art Werger's prints are based in his New Jersey childhood. His city scenes glitter with the twinkling lights of thousands of office buildings and street signs. They entice us to come see what's happening in the urban big town and become a part of the party. But there is a dark feel about some of them as well. We are transported back in time to the black and white film noir era in some of his cityscapes.

His suburban scenes though, they reflect a quieter place and time; more evocative of childhood memories of summer evenings walking through the neighborhood streets with a friend, or the family dog. The lighting Werger imbues with these images also has a special quality, as light filters through the tree-lined streets dancing over us as in a dream-like place.

Werger is an artist who revels in the complexities of printmaking process, and who carefully refines his images with intense precision. These are tremendous works of a master completely working in his element.

Public Collections:
The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
the Boston Public Library
the Brooklyn Museum
the Philadelphia Museum of Art
the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Trenton Museum, New Jersey

Exhibitions:
Festival Szuki, Rybnik 2000
Intergraphia Katowic
World Award Winners Gallery
Triennale Graphiki, Kracow, Poland 2000

Peter Jogo's Prints of Indulgence

Okay, I am gonna say it. It isn’t fair! Man, how does Peter Jogo do it? The guy’s work is outstanding, even in a field of outstandingly great printmakers. The richness of his textures, and lights and darks, and the close-up way he gets to a still life subject, and then the way he pans back down a small town night time street scene – with the lone street light illuminating the composition. Well, it can make even a veteran printmaker want to cry.

I was enthralled with his Monopoly player pieces, but I truly love his landscapes and their skies. The work translates superbly in black and white, and in color. It’s a good thing he doesn’t do painting, because landscape painters would commit harikari.

Jogo understands his subjects well, and has a real feel for the landscape found in Pennsylvania. It is quiet, reflective and peaceful. The night time scenes accurately portray the life in a small town and one can imagine that the crickets are humming in the shadows. These small print indulgences are treasures in time, and serenity.

Jogo’s prints capture the silence and stillness in both rural and urban landscapes. Many of the settings for his night time landscapes is the town where he lives in Pennsylvania. With his masterful use of subtle tones, set against strong, deep shadows, this artist develops his evocative, velvety black compositions. No matter the setting, Jogo's prints create inviting spaces for us to pause and reflect.

The same is true for his uniquely intriguing micro prints of Monopoly boards and pieces. These prints sing with assurance and masterful technical prowess. The close ups on these pieces are stunningly real and the pieces’ cast reflections onto the Monopoly board are terrific. Truly, the artist is reveling in his craft. It is dumbfounding how well these pieces are portrayed. We should all strive to find more of Jogo’s work online and in galleries. He is out there, and any of his works would be a gem for your print collection.

Peter Jogo was born in Deposit, New York, (a small town east of Binghamton, NY). He studied first at the State University of New York at Albany, then went on to receive his Master of Fine Arts degree from Cornell University. He currently lives and works in Pennsylvania.

Jogo has received several awards, namely a Strathmore Award for Watercolor Excellence from the Butler Institute of American Art, purchase awards from the Pratt Graphics Center, DeCordova Museum, North Carolina Print and Drawing Society, the Print Club of Philadelphia, and the University of Wisconsin.

The Mezzo-Manic Prints of Carol Wax

Man, oh Man, OH MAN! I mean Really, my inked up comrades, take a Good look! The images you are about to experience are about the BEST there are to see, and the artist (Carol Wax) has been setting the print world on its ears with these masterpieces. High praise you might say, but honestly, when Wax started exhibiting these prints, people's eyes popped, and one could hear the collective swearing of printmakers the world over, saying, "Damn, how does she DO it?" Well, we printmakers know 'how' she does the process, and it's hard and difficult and most would say its a pain in the a--, but it is a process that has historically, and continues to, yield rich, velvety black tones like no other. Technique aside, because I don't need to delve into that, nor will I, Wax's prints are simply dazzling.

Some obvious things that stand out in Wax's work are the cool, slick, gleam of her subjects; their rich detail and crisp lines. Wax would appear to treat them with a loving and reverent care, as an antique collector would for his/her possessions. She repeatedly produces astoundingly wonderful and complex compositions that invite our eyes to meander through them like one would through Cezanne's highly structured paintings or the Ab Ex brushstrokes of Willem DeKooning. They arrest our attention, but what they do next is transport us to another era, another period where the invention of machines and their design was an art. 

"My mezzotints of prosaic objects reflect my experience of the ordinary as extraordinary. By manipulating light, shadows, repetitive patterns, and skewing perspectives, I strive to reveal the anima in the inanimate."

Well, that's an understament if ever there was one. Wax take objects from a by-gone era of what look like the 1930s and 1940s. Some are portrayed frontally like icons of communication. The mechanics of other objects are mostly splayed out  in some state of dis-assembly. The gears and parts are strewen about, perfectly filling the picture plane. Further, Wax balances the light and shadows pouring over the objects in an engaging and tantalising manner. To be honest, the shadows activate the negative space, caressing the subjects. We'd just like to be able to touch them. 

The effect of Wax's works makes one feels like they're in an old black and white film, a noir, or a Garbo flick, or the film My Man Friday. The flash, the substance of those old objects that transport us to another place and time are all the more interesting when one considers that Wax is describing older mechanisms of communication via an even older tool of visual communication - (the mezzotint rocker). 

One wonders if Wax has a particular fascination for this era since she has spent so much time invested in these items, but in truth it doesn't matter. Who cares? These antiques are ageless and in perfect condition. Wax's choice of subject makes a decided departure from what one normally sees of this process, and for that we are grateful. As she once said in an interview, she understood that realistic images weren't necessarily seen as creative or conceptual, yet she boldly stated that there was a lot of printmaking that wasn't  creative anyway. Sadly, this is true.

I do like the way the artist puts a little chaos into a seemingly inanimate object - as in the case below, the typewriter's ribbon has gone haywire and is completely untangled from its spool. She makes the chaos fun. These images are sleek, sexy and invoke out tactile sensibilities. Granted her choice of subject is far from the norm associated with the process, but that is the beauty of printmaking, it's legacy evolves as do we, and investigative printmakers like Wax have helped propel an older method of making inked up images to give them a fresh look. 

And then, just when we think Wax is the mezzo-manic master of black and white imagery, she shocks us with this colorfully refined gem below. Can't you just hear that thing's keys go clack, clack, clack? I don't tire from looking at her work. She has made a clear and decisive impression upon our field, and we can marvel at what she's achieved. Here's to hoping more of our brethren are inspired to achieve something new with our own work after savouring hers.

Biography:

Carol Wax was born in New York City,1953. She attended the Manhattan School of Music, and earned a Bachelor of Music Degree in 1975 majoring in Flute Performance. She continued as a professional musician until 1980.

In the mid 1970s, she took printmaking courses at the Lake Placid School of Art, and then studied printmaking at the Pratt Graphics Center in New York City.  She looked at the work of Philip Pearlstein and gravitated to the historical process of mezzotint. Beginning in the mid-1980s, Wax  conducted research into historical printmaking techniques while continuing to develop her own work.  She spent several years learning and piecing together the history o her process until in 1990, Harry N. Abrams published The Mezzotint: History and Technique.

Wax has taught printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design,  the State University of New York at New Paltz and at New Tork University, and Montclair State University

In 2002, Wax moved to upstate New York where she continues to work.

Awards:
2011 - Head Juror, First International Mezzotint Festival, Ekaterinberg Museum of Fine Arts, Ekaterinberg,  Russia
2009 -  Individual Support Grant, Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation
2004 - Concordia Career Advancement Award
2003 - Artist's Fellowship Grant , New York Foundation for the Arts 
1994 - Louise Nevelson Award for Excellence in Printmaking from the American Academy of Ats and Letters
The MacDowell Colony Residency,  New Hampshire
1996 - designed a system for attaching adjustable weights to the mezzotint rocker, the first improvement to rocker design in over three hundred years.

Collections:
Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Museum of American Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Boston and New York Public Libraries

Contact: 914 788 5329 or cwax@earthlink.net

Master of his Universe: The Prints of Guntars Sietins

It would be hard for anyone not already indoctrinated to the mysteries of printmaking to imagine why or how one makes work like that of Latvia's Guntars Sietins. Yet, his work doesn’t require we know the inside scoop how he conjures up these luscious  prints with their velvety black shadows and precise, meticulous detail. We simply shouldn’t care for they are spectacular prints and no matter how he makes them, we are picking our jaws up off the floor in awe. They are incredible images that have found a bridge between the rational and the insanely obsessed. 

The netherworld of Sietins prints is one where we identify ourselves with the shiny metal ball. The universe it courses through is filled with a sort of timelessness, and an endless spectrum of letters, words and digits. We become the ball as it rolls around this pinball machine world, like a pendulum between reason and the precipice of our demise.

The cavernous places Sietins lets us roll around in are filled with letters and numbers and niches for all minutia of time. Some places look  like ouija boards, and some torture us with color wheels labeled only in black and white. There is no need for him to bring these images to color or the optical illusions as created with Victor Vasarely's eye-popping prints. These pieces function in the purest of range of black and white and they require nothing else. The ball represents us as a sort of universal core – a sun perhaps – where it flows through space and time. We can easily traverse the spaces Sietins creates, but the logic of our placement on his compositions is measured and we feel uncomfortable moving outside the place he’s made for us.

 Sietins' subjects tend to defy gravity and he creates this deeply meditative atmosphere where we want to stay and take our time examining every inch of that seductive blackness. His mastery of the process is exceptional and he capably uses imagery seen in the east which revolves around math and order. We are intrigued and enjoy our 'roll around' in the depth of his surreal landscapes which seem to swing between the earth and the heavens.

Bio

Born in 1962, in Latvia, Sietins comes from the city of Kuldiga. He later moved to Riga where he studied art at the Applied Arts College and the Academy of Arts. Currently he is professor of Graphic Art at the prestigious Latvian Academy of Art, in Riga. Sietins has widely exhibited his prints throughout Europe, Japan and the United States and his works are included numerous museum collections throughout Europe.

Recent awards:

International Print Biennale in Maastricht, the Netherlands

Felicien Rops International Print Triennial

International Print Triennial, Poland

15th Space International Print Biennial, Seoul, Korea

1st Printmaking Triennial, Thesaloniki, Greece

Aomori Print Triennial, Aomori, Japan

right: picture of Guntars Sietins

Contact:

Art Academy of Latvia

13 Kalpaka boulevard, Riga, LV-1867, Latvia

Phone: +371 67332202; + 371 67336200

Fax: +371 6722863

E-mail: info@lma.lv; lma@latnet.lv, www.lma.lv

E-mail: guntars.sietins@lma.lv 

Phone: + 371 26440595