Praeterita

I hosted a group of about forty people in my studio this week. They were visiting several studios in my building as part of Art Encounters, a group that organizes tours of artists' studios in the Chicago area. The group leader, Joanna, led a sensitive and thoughtful discussion of my work. Almost all my business cards and postcards disappeared, so there may be future sales arising from the visit. But aside from that, it was good to talk about this new body of work for the first time and to receive such positive responses to it.

At Play, collagraph intaglio print, Jean Harper If there's one thing that's nicer than teaching a printmaking class to engaged and talented adults, it's when one of those participants submits a print made in the class to a competition or exhibition with a successful outcome. The above print is a collagraph by Jean Harper, made if I remember correctly by incising shapes into matboard and then adding some carborundum here and there. Jean's day job is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University East, but clearly her future lies in the field of Fine Art. The print is on display at the 41st Annual Whitewater Valley Art Competition . To see my schedule of future classes at Interlochen College of Creative Arts, sign up to their mailing list here .

Seen and Unseen , oil on layered glassine, 20" x 28" (detail)             "  the dread of something after death, The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn No traveller returns. " Hamlet, Act 3, scene 1 In the United States, a country obsessed with youth culture and the eternal postponement of old age, one of the greatest taboos is to talk openly about the aging process and death. In her exhibition at Hofheimer Gallery in Chicago, artist Mary Porterfield bravely depicts some of the adverse effects of aging with a clear-eyed gaze, a skillful hand, and a great degree of compassion. In these oil paintings on glassine, we see the faces, hands, and bodies of the aged with nothing hidden. Porterfield's brush carefully depicts all the wrinkles, the folds, the sagging of flesh on bones, the pallid skin and the red-rimmed eyes. In many of the paintings we see the same female face, apparently that of the artist's grandmother who experienced memory ...

Over the summer, I have been making oil paintings, etchings, and terracotta sculptures with a common theme: a pair of arms and hands reaching out to or holding a crow. The theme ultimately derives from the darker, industrial work I did a few years ago, based on memories of my coalminer-grandfather in England. That started with images of him as a boxer, or lying on the ground after being injured in an accident underground. Gradually, the image has become refined until I'm just using the arms. The crow just floated into the pictures, as it were. I've always loved crows, and I can picture them sitting in the trees in the village where I grew up, or on the top of the church, cawing up a storm. They are associated with sinister things, which still links to the idea of misfortune in my work. But I also just love their shape and colour. The etchings are slightly more detailed-looking than the paintings: And the clay sculptures are somewhere in between, technically: I...

I saw this photograph in an exhibition in Tucson, Arizona. It was taken by Edouard-Denis Baldus in 1855, and it is an albumen print of the church of Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois in Paris. It stands across an open plaza from the Louvre, and the contemporary view is almost unchanged from 164 years ago. But it was the date of this photo, plus the razor sharpness of the image, that put me in a great state of wonder. As far as I understand it, the great detail and high contrast in such photographs was made possible because the image was printed onto paper coated with egg white, and so it was dispersed over the surface of the paper rather than sinking into the paper fibres. That's what makes this photo seem like it was taken yesterday, perhaps with one of those Instagram filters added to it. But then, when you realise that the picture was taken in 1855, the mind starts to get dizzy at the sudden collapsing of all that time, a century and a half disappearing in an instant. 164 y...

You'd think that there'd be nothing new to see in a major museum show devoted to Edouard Manet. But the exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, Manet and Modern Beauty , is full of surprises. There a few examples of his most celebrated works, such as Boating from 1874-75, but it's the many pieces in different media and on a small scale that really take your breath away. There are lots of watercolours, often contained within letters that are displayed in frames on the gallery walls. The looseness and spontaneity of these quick and closely observed studies is endlessly delightful. There's even a case with the watercolour box he was using close to his death in 1883. The drawings, too, are fresh and intimate in nature.  Many of the oil and pastel pictures are selected from an 1880 exhibition in Paris. The final gallery in the show is filled with small pictures he painted during his last months, many of which are studies of flowers or vegetables such as as...

If people go to Grand Rapids, Michigan, these days to see some art, it's usually to take in the DeVos-funded Art Prize that consumes the city every autumn. But by far the best art in the region is held at the Grand Rapids Art Museum. From the outside, the building does not look huge, but its three floors are currently displaying a refreshed hanging of works from its collections, and it's absolutely terrific. Every room has several great pieces. On this visit, I was pleased to see how many prints they were showing, starting with this woodcut by Ilya Schor . Next, a soft ground etching by Magdalena Abakanowicz :  Then a huge multicoloured woodcut by Susan Rothenberg : Now a bright lithograph by David Hockney : A screenprint by Jacob Lawrence : And finally, a lithograph by Alexander Calder , part of a small but excellent exhibition of prints in this medium: If any of these names are unfamiliar to you, I strongly recommend you follow the links from their names...