Woman and Web

         As I continue with my busy busy fall season, I’ve got three exciting new blocks ready to print and another little one just printed (plus a short story coming out later this month - not to mention 3 poetry events, 1 printmaking event, and a spec fic lecture all before the end of November).  I’ll share those when I get a chance, but until then here’s a piece that seemed seasonally appropriate.

        This woodblock print is by Caspar David Friedrich (Germany, 1774-1840), a Romantic, almost Gothic landscape painter whose work has risen and fallen in popularity in inverse proportion to the popularity of modernism.  Friedrich was one of the first to use landscape to convey psychological and political messages, using dark and subtle colors and dramatic light effects, so this woodcut is not exactly his usual ouevre.  On the other hand, the woman turned away from the viewer, contemplating or looking for something within a lonely wilderness… that’s pure Friedrich.

        By the time this piece was made Friedrich’s use of woodcut as a medium was a deliberate return to earlier German wood block printmaking, and an adaptation of those earlier styles for use as an independent art form instead of merely a method of reproduction.  His use of differently angled hatch lines is an interesting way to differentiate different areas while keeping them all in shadow, but I particularly like the texture of the tree trunks, as well as the more detailed thistles and plants to the left.

        What do you think the woman is thinking about?  Is this actually Miss Muffet, grown older now but about to have a recurrence of her youthful surprise?

[Picture: Woman with Spider’s Web Between Bare Trees, woodcut by Caspar David Friedrich, 1803 (Image from Art Institute Chicago).]

New Classic of Mountains and Seas

         I need to start this post with the old Classic of Mountains and Seas.  Shanhai jing is a Chinese text from the early Han dynasty (about 200-1 BCE), although the earliest versions may have been started as long ago as the fourth century BCE.  It takes the form of a geography book describing the strange creatures that can be found in areas spreading across more than 500 mountains and 300 waterways.  As such it functions much like a medieval European bestiary: the creatures are described primarily in their use or danger to humans, with many magical properties and a lot of ancient Chinese mythology.  As such, I’ve referred to it many times in my posts about fabulous creatures, including quite a few of them listed in Y is for Yonder.

        With that background, let me introduce New Classic of Mountains and Seas, which is a project by artist Qiu Anxiong (China, b. 1972).  Apparently Qiu has worked on this idea in multiple media over many years, including an ink animation film, as well as paintings and wood block prints.  The concept in all of them is to describe modern technologies as if they were mythical creatures.  I encountered some of his wood block prints, made to mimic the

look of early printed editions of the original Classic of Mountains and Seas, at the Philadelphia Art Museum and was quite taken with them.  Just like the texts which they mimic, these pieces come with a description of a creature along with the illustration.  The first one above says, “To the west of the great wasteland there is a kind of bird with four wings and a tail.  A single toe grows on each of its four feet that are connected to one another.  It makes a loud sound like thunder.  It is called ‘Xuanbei.’”  That name means “swirling bird” and it represents a whirlybird helicopter.

        Ten years after the set of twelve wood block prints (which was about 12 years after his first animated films on the same theme) Qiu continued to explore the idea with paintings.  Here’s a fun one with text that says “It moves at the speed of electricity,  It storms off like a rolling thunder;  It travels thousands of miles in the wind;  Unfettered between heaven and earth.  New Classic of Mountains and Seas; Ha Lei.”  The name of the creature, “Ha Lei,” is a phonetic approximation of “Harley.”

        Qiu’s 2008 portfolio had a particular emphasis on weapons, and some of them are quite poignant.  The “Bitu” bird, for example, is described “On the American continent there is a kind of giant bird with no head.  Its wings are long and large, suitable for flying high above

the clouds.  It does not rest anywhere but its nest.  Rarely can people see it.  It lays eggs in the sky, which strike thunders when hitting the ground and turn everything they touch into ashes.  It is called ‘Bitu’.”  This is the B-2 bomber.  Like all the best fantasy, Qiu prompts us to look again at our own world with fresh eyes and hearts.

        On the other hand, I also like the pieces that are simply whimsical.  Here is the “Kang Pu Si Shou” (computer) from the 2008 series.  And among the more recent paintings I particularly like the Moon Walker, and this tiny bee helicopter, “Ke Feng,” whose name I don’t know how to interpret.  It’s a lovely image, though.

        I love the whole concept of these works because they bring their meaning in two directions.  On the one hand, they use an ancient format to shed light on our modern world, and at the same time they shed light back on the ancient world by reminding us that those people, too, were trying to make sense of their world.  It’s also an excellent reminder that descriptions that sound crazy and fantastical to us often make a lot more sense when we realize what people were actually trying to describe.  If you like how this twists your brain, you may enjoy my game of Guess That Medieval Beast.  

You can play at

     Episode 1                    Episode 6

     Episode 2                    Episode 7

     Episode 3                    Episode 8

     Episode 4                    Episode 9

     Episode 5

[Pictures: Xuan Bei (Whirlybird), woodcut by Qiu Anxiong from New Classic of Mountains and Seas, 2008 (Image from MoMA);

Ha Lei (Harley), ink and color on paper by Qiu from New Classic of Mountains and Seas, 2018 (photo by AEGN at Philadelphia Art Museum, on loan from collection of Beningson and Arons);

Bi Tu (B-2), woodcut by Qiu from New Classic of Mountains and Seas, 2008 (Image from MoMA);

Kang Pu Si Shou (Computer), woodcut by Qiu from New Classic of Mountains and Seas, 2008 (Image from MoMA);

Moon Walker, ink and color on paper by Qiu from New Classic of Mountains and Seas, 2019 (Image from Artsy);

Ke Feng, ink and color on paper by Qiu from New Classic of Mountains and Seas, 2019 (Image from Artsy).]

Charles L. Marshall, Sr.

         Charles Leroy Marshall, Sr (USA, 1905-1992) hailed from Kansas.  Today I’ve got a cache of small linoleum block prints all made within a few years around 1929-1933.  I have actually shared one of Marshall’s pieces before at my post “Let There Be Light,” but that was hardly a representative example.  Today I’ve got a pleasing collection of scenes, all with a focus on architecture.

        I’m starting with a greeting card from 1931, partly because it might be my favorite, and partly to mention this orange ink.  Marshall seems to have printed many if not most of his pieces in both black versions and orange versions.  I have no idea whether he just really liked orange, or whether he got a great deal on orange ink cheap, or what.  It’s an unusual choice and I generally prefer the black versions, but I did want to include one in orange just to show you.  As for the subject, I’m a sucker for little, magical-looking towns in scenic locations.

        Next is the City Hall of Albany, NY, which I like for its spare composition and its gorgeous bare-branched trees.  I love the balance of having very little detail, but it’s exactly enough to express the scene.  I admire this style in part because I’m not very good at it.  In my own work I have no confidence about deciding what to include and what to leave out.

        The construction scene is certainly busier.  It reminds me of Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, which was published not too much later than this piece, in 1939.

        The next two pieces have, by contrast, more of a look of loneliness or solitude.  Lighthouses often tend to be isolated, and I like the way Marshall’s sky emphasizes the lands-end openness of the location.  The border of dark sky at the top also balances the dark land low in the picture.  The lighthouse is not the kind that’s usually considered picturesque, but its framework makes an interesting geometric pattern in silhouette against that spacious sky.

        Finally, here’s a “Construction Camp” that also emphasizes a wide sky, but this sky seems heavy.  Perhaps it’s just the grey paper, but it gives me almost a gothic vibe of hunkering down beneath a windswept drizzle.  I’d expect a construction camp to be busy, but this one looks deserted - perhaps everyone’s elsewhere, hard at work.  I also like the choices of cutting strokes that make up the hillside below the buildings, and the power line that ties them all together.

        All of these pieces are quite small, generally in the neighborhood of 3x4 or 4x5, and I like how much they express with their relatively simple lines and shapes.  Since they’re all from such a brief period in the artist’s life I now want to see whether I can find out what Marshall did later.

        And what are your feelings about orange ink?

[Pictures: Untitled holiday card, linocut by Charles Leroy Marshall Sr., 1931;

Albany City Hall, linocut by Marshall, ca. 1932;

Untitled (construction), linocut by Marshall, ca. 1932;

Light House at Marblehead, linocut by Marshall, 1929;

Construction Camp, linocut by Marshall, ca. 1933 (All images from Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art).]

Daughter-in-Law C. Yoshida (and Granddaughter A.)

         I’m not finished with the Yoshida family yet.  Today I’m focusing on Hiroshi and Fujio’s daughter-in-law, wife of their younger son Hodaka.  Chizuko Yoshida (Japan, 1924-2017) joined three art associations when she was in her twenties.  One was a painting society founded by Hiroshi Yoshida, a second was a group for women oil painters founded by Fujio Yoshida, and the third was an avant-garde association in which Chizuko became interested in the push and pull between Western modernism and traditional Japanese aesthetics.  After she married Hodaka in 1953, around the time she was switching from painting to printmaking, she was influential in getting him involved in modernism, which also eventually influenced the work of Fujio and of Hodaka’s brother Tōshi.

        By way of choosing which pieces to share today, I wanted to post my favorites, but I also wanted to show the sweep of Chizuko’s various styles over time, which meant including some pieces I don’t actually care for.  So I’ve started with two pieces from the 1950’s, the first being one that I like a bit more, and the second being one that’s more representative of her early woodblock work, which tends to look to me like a lot of random stuff thrown together.

        Next, here’s a piece from the 1960s, during which Chizuko was doing a lot of work with embossing.  These don’t excite me, although I do feel the allure of embossing - especially since that’s one thing that rubber blocks and the back of a wooden spoon just can’t do.  You can see, though, that Chizuko was doing her own version of op art, which you can compare with some of the pieces I shared from her husband and her brother-in-law.

        These final two pieces date from the 1970s and are the ones I find most attractive.  I’m very partial to collections of natural forms that evoke both science and art.  However, to get that scientific detail of all different species of shells and butterflies, Chizuko used a combination of photoetching and woodblock printing, a combination Hodaka was also using extensively (although he was depicting primarily manmade, architectural images, rather than natural ones).  So even though I like these as art, I’m much less interested in them from a printmaking perspective, because photoetching sort of skips the actual physical creation part, which I love.  On the other hand, I wanted to include them as representative of some of Chizuko’s later work.  (Chizuko made a whole series of butterfly pieces over a long period, and I can certainly see why they’re popular.)  I also really like that today’s first piece and last piece, made more than 25 years apart, both represent blue butterflies.

        Finally, I want to include a piece by Chizuko and Hodaka’s daughter Ayomi Yoshida (Japan, b. 1958) who is also an artist.  Ayomi doesn’t get a whole post of her own because I don’t for the most part care for her work, (and later she also got into “deconstructing” block printing by making installations of blocks and chips, which interests me only to the extent that it irritates me as a waste of a wonderful medium!)  However, Ayomi certainly belongs in any discussion of this famous printmaking family, so I include one piece from 1989 that’s pretty cool.  All the gouges are pretty much the same - one tool, same direction, same size - but the arrangement and colors turn it into light on water.  You can see an op art influence in this, too.

        So, seven artists over 4 generations in one family - and each of them pushing and pulling to find their own voice and style.  It must be both encouraging and constraining to be surrounded by so much artistic inspiration, advice, support, and opinion.

[Pictures: Butterfly B, woodblock print by Chizuko Yoshida, 1953 (Image from Asian Art Museum);

Night in the Desert, woodblock print by C. Yoshida, 1959 (Image from Art Institute Chicago);

Blue Line, woodblock print by C. Yoshida, 1960s (Image from MFA Boston);

Reef, Shell C, photoetching and woodblock print by C. Yoshida, 1976 (Image from The British Museum);

Valley of Butterflies, photoetching and woodblock print by C. Yoshida, 1979 (Image from Art Institute Chicago);

Touches 2W -C.V.B., woodblock print by Ayomi Yoshida, 1989 (Image from Art Institute Chicago).]

Little Brother H. Yoshida

         Today I’m back to the Yoshida family of artists to share some work by Hodaka Yoshida (Japan, 1926-1995).  As the second son, Hodaka was not expected to follow in his father’s footsteps and style.  Indeed, he was not supposed to be an artist at all - but he rebelled and became an artist, in a modernist and abstract style quite unlike the family tradition.  (To review what Hodaka wasn’t doing, you can check my post on Big Brother Tōshi Yoshida.)

        Hodaka began making woodblock prints in 1950, and an early example is this first one, which surprises me by how much I like it!  I especially like the way the colors layer.  It’s clearly a landscape of sorts, although obviously quite abstract.  Then in 1955 Hodaka encountered Pre-Columbian art, which inspired him to head in a whole new direction.  You can really see this in today’s second piece, which is very clearly copying Mayan motifs, but Hodaka also did lots of pieces that were influenced by this style without being so direct.  One example might be today’s fourth piece, made a few years later.

        At the same time, Hodaka was also experimenting with applying a graphic arts filter to more traditional subjects, such as this view of a teahouse, reduced to simplified geometric shapes arranged dramatically across the paper.  Three of the prints I’m sharing today (2,3, and 5) were all made in 1956, so it was apparently my favorite year in his work!

        In the 1960s Hodaka encountered pop art, and began experimenting with media such as silkscreen, photo-transfer, and collage.  Eventually in his later years he settled into a combination of wood blocks with photo-etching.  Art historians point to all this as new, edgy, important work, but as I have little interest in it, I’ll leave Hodaka there.

        In fact, I’ll finish up back in 1956 with this piece that may be my absolute favorite of his that I found.  Although it doesn’t look as Pre-Columbian as some of the others, the influence is right there in the title: “Ancient People, Maya.”  But whatever its inspiration, with its quilt-like mix of patterns, geometry, and softness, its soothing colors, and its interesting layering, I find this one deeply pleasing.

        A confluence of circumstances allowed and encouraged Hodaka to explore his own artistic direction.  In his childhood he was surrounded by artists but not expected to conform to them, then he launched his art career just as government control of the arts gave way to freedom.  He met and married another artist whose connections to avant-garde circles encouraged further experimentation.  (We’ll see what she was doing in the next post!)  In the end, Hodaka’s abstract work ended up influencing both his older brother Tōshi and his mother Fujio.

        What do you think?  Do you prefer the Yoshida family traditional work, or this more modern art?

[Pictures: Woods, color woodblock print by Hodaka Yoshida, 1954 (Image from Art Institute Chicago);

Crafty God, wood block print by Yoshida, 1956 (Image from Scholten Japanese Art);

Teahouse, wood block print by Yoshida, 1956 (Image from National Gallery of Art);

Ancestor, woodblock print by Yoshida, 1958 (Image from Scholten Japanese Art);

Ancient People, Maya, wood block print by Yoshida, 1956 (Image from Egenole Gallery).]

Big Brother T. Yoshida

         My last post was about the artist Fujio Yoshida, who was married to the artist Hiroshi Yoshida.  Today’s post will be about their elder son, Tōshi Yoshida (Japan, 1911-1995).  Tōshi’s artistic beginnings seem to have been influenced primarily by his grandmother, who encouraged him to draw animals, but eventually he was apprenticed in his father’s workshop.  This meant his job was to carry on the family’s artistic style, as defined by his father, rather than to follow his own preferences.  That he may not have been entirely happy with this is evidenced by the fact that as soon as Hiroshi died in 1950, Tōshi went off into a radically different style, highly stylized and even abstract.  However, eventually he worked the rebellion out of his system and returned to detailed realism, but with a focus on animals as subjects.  So after my cursory look at his biography and work, I see three phases in Tōshi’s woodblock prints.  Here are a couple of examples of each.

        First, the early work in which Tōshi followed in his father’s shin-hanga footsteps.  These two pieces are beautiful examples of the style that combines traditional Japanese woodblock techniques and sensibilities with western-art-trained perspective and light effects.  They are serene, meticulous, and controlled, which reflects the controlled environment in which they were made: not only a dutiful son, but living under a dictatorship that censored art.

        Second, the wild and crazy middle work beginning in the 1950s, in which Tōshi turned to  total abstraction, then also strange, stylized magical landscapes.  Many of his abstract works could be considered op art, before it had become a movement or the term was coined.  In this example the layers of finely carved lines create dazzling and disorienting interference patterns, while the central figures (which evoke early Chinese characters to my western eyes) provide a focus.  I like the landscapes even more, and this one evokes a huge mysterious monument towering over a desert outcropping.  This one begs for stories, while suggesting all the unknowns of lost civilizations and alien worlds.

        Third, the return to representationalism and the celebration of the animals Tōshi saw and loved on his extensive travels.  He particularly liked African animals, and many of his prints do include scenic backgrounds, but I chose this one for its drama.  You can see the meticulous realism combined with the use of those traditional Japanese printmaking techniques in the carving of the fur and the shading of the background.  And finally I include a very different example from Tōshi’s later prints because A) I think it’s just really cool, and B) I notice the way the sky echoes those op art lines from his abstract period while the silhouetted deer ground this scene in his return to realism.

        Tōshi Yoshida’s life looks to me like a trajectory of an artist struggling at times to find his own voice, while making absolutely stunning work at every step along the way.  Tune in next time to see some pieces by his little brother, whose artistic development followed a very different path.

[Pictures: Half Moon Bridge, woodblock print by Tōshi Yoshida, 1941 (Image from Fuji Arts);

Iidabashi, woodblock print by Yoshida, 1939 (Image from The British Museum);

Misty Dance, woodblock print by Yoshida, 1957 (Image from The British Museum);

Illusion, woodblock print by Yoshida, 1966 (Image from The British Museum);

Black Panther, woodblock print by Yoshida, 1987 (Image from Fuji Arts);

Mendocino, Sunrise, woodblock print by Yoshida, 1985 (Image from The British Museum).]

F. Yoshida's Flowers

         Fujio Yoshida (Japan, 1887-1987) came from a family of artists, but was the first woman in the family to work as an artist.  I saw a couple of her color woodblock prints of flowers at the Harvard Art Museums last year, and enjoyed them.  They obviously have a lot in common with the flower paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe, with whom Yoshida was an almost exact contemporary.  I don’t know of any statement of direct influence, but given that Yoshida travelled to the United States for shows at just around the time O’Keeffe was exhibiting her earliest enlarged flower paintings, it seems very likely that Yoshida would be aware of them.  However, it was not until 1949 that Yoshida began making her own abstract flower paintings, for which she would place flowers inside a glass fishbowl in order to magnify them.

        The woodblock prints came in 1953.  These pieces are certainly not as large as O’Keeffe’s canvases, but they are larger than life, and share the same sense of abstraction.  At first glance they could be purely abstract, but then you can see how they’re actually zoomed-in views.  It’s interesting to see the traditional Japanese printmaking methods used for such a different style of art.

        I don’t like the dull colors of this narcissus as much, but I do appreciate that it’s an interesting choice, especially compared to the particularly bright greens of the ladyslipper orchid.  I also like that Yoshida has chosen to show the flower from the back, rather than the stereotypical front view.

        I’ve featured woodblock prints by some other member of the Yoshida family in previous posts.  You can see a street scene by her husband Hiroshi here.  Hiroshi had been adopted by her father to be the successor of the family’s art tradition, because of course it couldn’t be a girl.  But after her father died Hiroshi enrolled her in art school and they held joint exhibitions together.  You can see one of his Sailboats here, and Garden in Summer here.  The couple had two sons, both of whom also became artists.  You can see a strange alien city by Tōshi Yoshida here.

        As for Fujio herself, I like how different these flower details are from anything her artistic father or husband had done, although her second son’s abstract work was apparently an influence on her.  Anyway, I love O’Keefe’s flowers, and I like these, as well.

[Pictures: Ladyslipper Orchid, woodblock print by Fujio Yoshida, 1954;

Flowering Kale, woodblock print by Yoshida, 1953;

Narcissus, woodblock print by Yoshida, 1954 (All images from Harvard Art Museums).]

The Range of Gibbings

         Robert Gibbings (Ireland, 1889-1958) was very influential in reviving wood engraving as an artistic medium in the twentieth century.  He worked as an illustrator, author, and publisher, so he was instrumental in defining how relief printing was used throughout a formative period of twentieth century art and design.  The thing about his work that strikes me is the variety of styles he uses over the course of his career.  Early on he was influenced by cubism and modernism, which you can see in this most excellent castle.  There’s definitely something cubist about the perspective and the shading of the blocks that make up the architecture.

        He also developed something he called a “vanishing line” technique, in which many edges and outlines are missing.  This is a style that fascinates me, in large part because I find myself utterly unable to do it.  It requires far more faith in one’s own artistic ability, in the possibilities of graphic design, and in the eyes of the beholder than I have ever been able to summon.  This woman is certainly not the most extreme example, but it’s one of my favorites.  Is she contemplating the next move in a chess game, or is she staring at some other sort of “Problem” to be solved?  With so many details elided I can’t tell for sure, but it’s amazing to me how much we do see in this image, even though it isn’t really there: the whole shape of the woman’s head and body.

        By contrast, this scene of a mill is quite realistic, without any hint of cubism.  Nevertheless, you can see Gibbings’s ability to leave out a lot of details and outlines.  I particularly love how the smaller branches of the trees are dashed lines, and the shaded area between the two wings of the mill is entirely black.  I admire how little carving it takes to pick out an entire scene in small details of white, and I love the serenity of a place that’s been conjured out of so little.

        This last piece is from much later in Gibbings’s career, and by now his style is full of fine textures and little details for an entirely different look.  He was particularly successful writing and illustrating travel memoirs, and this detailed style served well to share scenes from his travels all around the world.  (All this travel was possible because he wasn’t much concerned with family responsibility!  But for today I’m just here to share the relief prints.)

        I’ve featured a few other pieces by Gibbings in past posts, and it’s well worth revisiting Sea Creatures, Under Snow, and Year of the Snake to see more pieces that demonstrate the wide range of styles that strikes me so much about his work.

[Pictures: Castle at Saumur, wood engraving by Robert Gibbings, c. 1925 (Image from V&A);

The Problem, woodcut by Gibbings, 1921 (Image from V&A);

The Mill, wood engraving by Gibbings, 1920s (Image from V&A);

Standing Stones, wood engraving by Gibbings, 1951 (Image from V&A).]

City Scenes by Troy

         Today’s block prints are by Adrian Troy (UK/USA, 1901-1977).  I could find little biography for him, other than that he was born in England, went to high school in France, made prints for the WPA in the US, and taught wood engraving in Chicago.  Of course I’d like to know a little more about him, but as usual in these cases, I just have to look at the art on its own.  This first piece is the one that got me interested in Troy, and it’s my favorite that I’ve found.  I love the interesting perspective, as if perhaps we’re in an upper story of the building across the street.  I love the slightly wobbly lines of the architecture, making the whole thing quirky and whimsical.  There are also all kinds of hints at untold stories here: the building is quite fancy with a pediment and a name, and handsome architectural details around the windows, but it has a “For Rent” sign as if perhaps it’s come down in the world.  The two people calling back and forth to each other from the street to the third floor must have something going on between them.  The shadow across the front of the building and in the alley by the fire hydrant hint of further atmosphere.

        Next is a busy scene of a produce market.  There are men with trucks and barrows, women and children, a garage and gas pump, warehouses and crates, trash cans and a trolley car…  There’s some interesting stuff going on with the view, like the juxtaposition of different perspectives as if this is more of a montage of scenes than a single view.  There’s also a sort of cutaway on the Garage roof, so that we can see the trucks parked inside.  This simultaneously seems like a very real and specific place (“South State St. Market” at the corner of S. State St. and 69th St.), while also being an impressionistic version of it.

        The final piece shows bricklayers at work for a WPA project, and it comes from a series on road-building.  I don’t quite like how very blank the men’s faces are, but I love everything else, from the balance of black-white-and-texture, to the details of the manhole cover and the tools, to the positions and jackets of the workers.  I also really love the mini silhouette view and carved title at the bottom.

        All of these scenes have such specificity that they must be real places.  The info given with the scene of the market does say it’s in Chicago, so my assumption is that the others are, as well.

        For some additional related block print viewing pleasure, if you want an overview of the WPA program, read my post WPA Printmaking.  If you like the busy cityscape of the second piece, check out Christopher Hutsul’s Cityscapes.  If you want to see a couple different examples of block prints that play with perspective to combine more views into a single scene, try Leopoldo Méndez at Working, and Gwenda Morgan at Morgan’s World.

[Pictures: 4117 Wentworth Avenue, woodcut by Adrian Troy, 1935/42 (Image from Art Institute Chicago);

The Produce Market/South State Street Market, woodcut by Troy, 1935/40 (Image from Art Institute Chicago);

Brick-Laying, woodcut by Adrian Troy, 1935/37 (Image from Art Institute Chicago).]