Hamanishi Katsunori, Setsugo , 1977, mezzotint The Japanese rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago have an exhibition of mezzotint prints by contemporary American-Japanese artist Hamanishi Katsunori. You make a mezzotint by employing a blade with a rocking handle to rough up the surface of the copper plate, creating a lattice-work of tiny burrs that hold a lot of ink. The more you use the rocker, the denser the dark tone will be. You then create the image by scraping and burnishing the dark ground to introduce the grey-through-white tones. So, the more you burnish, the whiter the line. As one can see from the above print, mezzotint enables one to produce images of immense realism and delicacy. I think that Katsunori's most successful prints are the ones like this one, where he places unusual combinations of objects together in a way that enables him to explore tone and volume. A really good feature of the exhibition was a cabinet of tools and a sample plate with graded mezz...
Artist Philip Hartigan talks about art, interviews other artists, and more