Printmakers and the American Flag

As we Americans celebrate our country's founding with a day of parades, hot dogs, beer, ice cream, family gatherings and a fair amount of flag-waving, I thought it would be appropriate to show a few examples of printmakers' images of the American flag. Enjoy my inked up friends, and take a day to enjoy our freedoms and the spirit in which we live. Have a Happy Fourth!

The Twisted Reality of M.C. Escher

Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898 –1972) was a graphic artist whose mathematically-inspired prints have been insanely popular for decades.I have always found his work technically perfect, and driven by a warped sense of reality - at least what he chooses to show his viewers. His mind-bending compositions are so complex, but they let us defy the gravity of our existence to go crawl around in his. Let's take a look at this topsy-turvy master printmaker.

Born in Leeuwarden, Friesland, his family moved to Arnhem in 1903, where he attended school until 1918. He was a sickly child, and was placed in a special school at the age of seven. In 1918, he went to the Technical College of Delft. From 1919 to 1922, he attended the Haarlem School of Architecture and Decorative Arts; briefly studied architecture, but settled on studying decorative arts.

In 1922, Escher traveled through Italy and Spain. He was impressed by the Moorish architecture with its intricate designs, especially those found at the fourteenth-century Alhambra. Its designs had geometrical symmetries featuring interlocking repetitive patterns in the colored tiles, and sculpted into the walls and ceilings. This experience infused Escher’s interest in mathematics and tessellation.

The sketches he made of the Alhambra and the Mezquita, the Moorish mosque of Cordoba, had a career-long influence upon his work with geometric forms, unusual perspective, and multiple points of view.He lived in Rome from 1923 to 1935, where he met and married Jetta Umiker. The couple settled in Rome and raised three sons. In 1935, the political climate in Italy became unacceptable to Escher. World War II forced him to move in 1941, to the Netherlands, where he lived until 1970. Most of his best-known works date from this period.

In July 1969 he finished his last work, called Snakes, in which snakes wind through a pattern of linked rings. These shrink to infinity toward both the center and the edge of a circle. The image exhibits Escher's love of symmetry, interlocking patterns, and his approach to death. In 1970, Escher moved to an artists' retirement home and maintained his own studio until his death in 1972. He is buried at the New Cemetery in Baarn.

Escher's work is mathematical and considered cerebral. Escher is not the first artist to explore mathematical themes: Parmigianino, William Hogarth, and Giovanni Battista Piranesi also experimented with mathematics in their work. Cubism and Surrealism had affinity with Escher’s work, but he did not embrace their movements.

In his early years, Escher sketched landscapes and nature. His early love of landscapes and nature created an interest in tessellation, which he called Regular Division of the Plane; this became the title of his 1958 book, where he described the systematic buildup of mathematical designs in his artworks. He began to explore the properties and possibilities of tessellation using geometric grids as the basis for his sketches. Although he did not have mathematical training—his understanding of mathematics was largely visual and intuitive.

Escher worked primarily in the printmaking media. In his graphic art, he portrayed mathematical relationships among shapes, figures and space. He was a "thinking artist" like Piero della Francesca, Leonardo da Vinci, and Albrecht Dürer. He often incorporated three-dimensional objects such as the Platonic solids such as spheres, tetrahedons and cubes into his works, as well as mathematical objects like cylinders and stellated polyhedra. Escher's artwork is especially well liked by mathematicians and scientists, who enjoy his use of polyhedra and geometric distortions.

Mathematicians have identified 11 strands of mathematical and scientific research inspired by Escher. His works have appeared on album and book covers, posters, clothing, and jigsaw puzzles . Both Austria and the Netherlands have issued postage stamps commemorating the artist and his works.


The asteroid 4444 Escher was named in his honor, in 1985.

He was awarded the Knighthood of the Order of Orange-Nassau in 1955. The M.C. Escher Company controls the artist’s intellectual property.

Public Collections
Escher Museum in The Hague
Huis ten Bosch, Japan
Israel Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
National Gallery of Canada

Ouida Touchon's Fascination with the Natural World

Ouida Touchon lives and works in the little town of Mesilla, New Mexico. Touchon studied art in Dallas, Texas, and in Kansas City, Missouri, before heading to New Mexico where she teaches at Dona Community College in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Her world is filled with birds, flowers and the beauty of Nature.

Touchon's use of the print medium isn't just a straight cut of the block and print onto plain paper. She chooses to embellish her images with pre-printed paper, further complicating and mixing up the textures of her prints.

The organic lines and multiple-layered images reflect her world view, oddly in opposition to her so-called spartan existence living in a virtual southwestern desert climate. One would not expect to see the clamour of color she infuses into her prints, but we are delighted with her bold color mixed with soft, delicate tones. We can hear her morning birds calling their mates among the flowering trees.

Touchon gives us a taste of the sweetness found in the southwest, and invites us to explore the hidden treasures of her environment. We could all do well to explore a place unknown to us, to enrich our creative souls, and nurture our artistic inspirations.

Education
M.A. University of Missouri - Kansas City, MO
B.F.A. Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, MO
A.A. El Centro College, Dallas, TX
Workshops
South Dakota, Scotland, England, Italy

Public Collections
Dona Ana Community College, Las Cruces, NM
El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, TX
Federal Building of Las Cruces, NM
Taylor-Barela-Reynolds-Mesilla State Monument , Mesilla, NM

Memberships
American Print Alliance
California Society of Printmakers
Dona Ana Arts Council
Los Angeles Print Society
National Museum of Women in the Arts
Southern Graphics Council

Tanigami Konan's Botanical Prints for Spring

In thinking about all things spring, I came upon the botanical prints of Tanigami Konan of Japan. His floral prints drew my attention immediately for their brilliant rich color and simplicity of composition. The thing is, though, they did not remind me of any botanical print I have ever seen before. There is something non-Asian about them. The compositions feel more influenced by western ideals than Asian, and in fact, they are.

The work is wonderfully simple in execution and as we might find in Asian works, there is little or nothing to distract us from the subject. The subject is all there is to see, and as a viewer, we cannot want for more. What is portrayed is perfect. Konan’s delicate lines and carefully composed blooms lets the viewer smell them and imagine walking amongst them in a garden of our own making.

Admirers and collectors of traditional botanical prints will find them refreshingly pungent in color, less concerned with scientific detail, although they are quite accurately described. The issue here is not to separate the viewer from the image- to analyze it – but to immerse the viewer with the subject. Konan succeeds in this goal superbly.

Tanigami Konan was born 1879 in Hyogo, Japan. He was a well-known artist of the Kacho-e Nihon-ga (birds and flowers) tradition, and he was the first Japanese artist to portray Western flowers. Konan produced five portfolios of prints called 'Seiyo Soka Zofu', (A Picture Album of Western Plants and Flowers), which were published in 1917/18. They were organized as a visual record of flowers, depicting them in full bloom. Four portfolios were devoted to the spring and summer flowers, and the last portfolio combined autumn/winter flowers and plants.

These prints display the very best flowers - tulips, lilies, daffodils, crocus, and iris of the botanical world. Their appeal was driven by the compositionally fuller style of the West versus the East’s more restrained version.

Konan is especially known for his peony series. (Peonies are one of my favorite flowers.) He was selected to create a series of twenty-four prints for the Teiten (Imperial Exhibition of 1917).
These prints were printed in a large format. Their bold, bright colors are stunning, and they are considered some of the finest floral images ever printed.

The choice to publish these prints was done at a very interesting time in Japan’s printmaking history; when older, traditional ways of printing were yielding to new western technologies.
Artists and printers in Japan were losing their living due to these modern developments, so they chose to pursue subjects that would appeal to Western collectors. Heavily influenced by the French Impressionist movement, they incorporated Western concepts of light, shade and perspective.

This new movement was called Shin Hanga or “new prints”, and it was an immediate success in early 20th-century Japan, during the Taishō and Shōwa periods. Shin Hanga subjects are vastly appealing: botanicals, landscapes, birds, animals and beautiful people.

It maintained the traditional ukiyo-e collaborative system (hanmoto system) where the artist, carver, printer, and publisher engaged in division of labor. The movement grew from 1915 to 1942, then halted briefly during World War II. The American occupation renewed interest in prints and many were sent home by the American troops.

Still as popular as ever, botanical print collectors would do well to add some of Konan's beauties to their collections. Enjoy, my inked up friends, and partake of a little stroll through Konan’s garden of delights.

The Japonisme Prints of Bertha Lum

Bertha Boynton Bull Lum (1869 – 1954) was born in Tipton, Iowa. She studied briefly at the Art Institute of Chicago. Around this time there were several exhibitions which popularized Japanese art and culture in America, including the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. She became enamored of the Japonisme movement and wanted to go visit Japan to study art.

In 1903, she married and honeymooned in Japan. She returned to the US and made several woodblock prints which clearly show the influence of both French impressionism and ukiyo-e. Lum made subsequent trips to Japan in 1907 and 1911, primarily to learn more about Japanese printmaking. She was able to study carving in the workshop of Bonkotsu Igami.

Later on she decided to hire carvers and printers to work under her since she came to realize that the Japanese system of collaborative printmaking was more efficient for her purposes. Her prints were featured in the 1912 Tenth Annual Art Exhibit in Ueno Park where she was the only Western artist included. Lum soon exhibited her work in Chicago and New York.

She moved to Peking, China in 1922, but returned to the United States in 1924 to live in California. She published two books, Gods, Goblins and Ghosts in 1922 and Gangplanks to the East in 1936. She left California in 1927, then returned to Peking in 1933. She continued to show her work in the United States and China until 1950. In 1953 she moved to Genoa, Italy, where died in 1954.

Lum's prints combine flowing, curvillinear Art-Nouveau lines with flat colorful sections that harken back to 19th century ukiyo-e. The subject of her work ranges from children to landscapes to mysterious figures from Asian folklore and legend. Lum envisioned Asia as an exotic, magical place full of lantern light, swirling smoke, and smiling women.

Stylistically, Lum's work is delicately printed with colorful light and shadowy clouds. Her figures fade into the atmosphere, giving the compositions a dramatic depth. Her work became influenced by the author Lafcadio Hearn, who translated Japanese legends and fairy tales into popular Western books. Ultimately, Lum’s work made a significant contribution to the Japonisme movement with her prints and paintings.

Awards
Silver medal at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition
Her work received honors in Rome, Paris and Portugal

Membership
Asiatic Society of Japan
California Society of Etchers (now the California Society of Printmakers)
Print Makers Society of California

Portrait of Bertha Lum.