Praeterita

I recently finished teaching a five week course in acrylic resist etching. I and my six students explored how to make hard ground, soft ground, and dry point intaglio prints using non-toxic materials, such as floor polish for a hard ground, relief ink for soft ground, soy sauce for degreasing, soda ash for a stripping solution. Some of the students were experienced printmakers, some were first time etchers, and some were first time for both. Uniformly, they each produced some spectacular prints. They were honestly better than my first efforts using these new materials, partly as a result of my long trial-and-error research into this, but mainly because of their own willingness and talent. Here are a few images from the class. First, a hard ground with chine colle: A couple of hard ground images mixed with drypoint: A softground etching: A hard ground: Finally, a hand-coloured hard ground etching:

Part 37 of an interview series in which artists reply to the same six questions. Today's respondent is artist Kate Ingold , whose work encompasses media as diverse as poetry, photography, and object-making. She is currently in the process of relocating from Chicago to Los Angeles; however, people in the midwest can see her work soon at Perry Farm , in Bourbonnais, IL, in collaboration with artist Joanne Aono .  “The relatively brief preponderance of moments,” antique mourning quilt embroidered with real platinum thread, wool batting, 69” x 69” approx., 2015 PH : What medium/media do you chiefly use, and why? KI : I consider myself a multi-disciplinary artist, but I suppose my primary medium is photography because I often start each project by making photographs. I print my photographs one time only and then treat them as substrates for drawings by tearing, scratching, sewing, and in other ways manipulating their surfaces. I also work in textiles (old and new), video, coll...

I've known the artist John Tomlinson for a few years. And by known, I mean "known", in that we so far have only become acquainted with each other via social media (though there was one near miss in New York City a few years ago). Such is the way of things, one feels after a while that one knows someone in the old fashioned way, too, after sharing and reading about each other's lives and works over a period of time. He is a phenomenal draughtsman, as this image of a graphite drawing shows: You can see a lot more of his work over at his website . I've also just become aware that he has begun a blog, and a handsome affair it is too. As a former professor of art at Parsons, and the director of the New York Studio Residency Program, what he has to say about art is going to be worth listening to. So in order to share the blog love, here is a link to John Tomlinson's nothing but art blog .

Recently I visited the Chicago studio of Industry of the Ordinary, a collaborative duo comprising artists Mat Wilson and Adam Brooks. A few years ago I reviewed their big show at the Chicago Cultural Center for Hyperallergic ( link here ). Rereading that review, I think I did a not-bad job of capturing in a condensed piece of writing what their work is about. When I spoke to them yesterday, I tried to get a sense of their histories, both personal and artistic, in a conversation that lasted well over an hour. Adam Brooks (l) and Mat Wilson (r). Photo: Philip Hartigan Rather than try and describe the conversation sequentially, I'm just going to provide bullet points of the main topics: Being British in America : Wilson was born in the UK and has lived in the USA for more than 20 years, Brooks is a US citizen who spent his formative years in England. I'm also an Englishman who's lived in the US for 14 years. Would any of us return to live in England? Does the English c...

I first came across the work of artist Rolf Nesch twenty years ago, in a printmaking manual that was lying around the studio of my etching teacher in London. Recently I saw images of his work online while I was searching for something else, and when I looked at more of his work, I was blown away by it. Nesch was actually a German, born in 1893. He fought in WWI, was considered as one of the German Expressionist painters, and only moved to Norway after the Nazis assumed power in Germany in the early 1930s. Unfortunately for Nesch, and the Norwegian people, Hitler followed him north less than a decade later. But that's another story. It was in Norway that Nesch came into his own as an artist, mainly in the area of printmaking. He was one of the first people to experiment with collagraph, the technique of making printing plates either out of found materials or by gluing objects to a surface (then inking and printing them). You could just lift the first ten images from a Google ima...

For this visit, it's back to Picasso's printmaking. Several of the rooms on the upper floor of the museum have samples of Picasso's linocuts, including a few of the blocks themselves. The print show above is one of his reduction linocuts, a process that he invented, and which entails printing several colours from one block by successively cutting away portions of the block between colour runs. I actually teach classes using this process, and it usually produces great results. The blocks show below are not reduction, but two blocks used for a four colour print, with an easy dividing line produced by the wavy line between hills and sky: I notice something that carries over from his etchings: there is a freedom of mark-making, and a refusal to be afraid of simplicity, that lends itself particularly well to the creation of an image using a soft material like linoleum.

In the previous post in this series , I talked about the displays of Picasso's cubist, or immediately pre-cubist, era sketchbooks that are displayed at the Musee Picasso in Paris. What you also see from the many personal items on show is that Picasso used anything that was at hand as a thing to draw on. In the photo above, a Cubist sketch of two faces appears on the back of an insurance policy. An interesting biographical side note: this is probably from around 1910, certainly pre-1914, and although Picasso didn't leave the bohemian world of Montmartre for good until 1913, he was clearly earning enough by now, and amassing enough worldly goods, that he felt the need to have something as un-bohemian and positively bourgeois as an insurance policy. I'm also amused by the fact that the policy covers damage to or accidents involving "automobiles and velocipedes."