I'm Kenney Mencher. I'm an artist who left a tenured professorship in 2016 to pursue making art full time. This blog is about art, art history, with a emphasis on human rights. I make homoerotic art featuring bears, otters & other gay wildlife.
Paul Cezanne, Still Life with Peppermint Bottle 1890-1894
Oil on canvas 25 5/8 x 31 7/8 in
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C
Paul Cezanne, The Basket of Apples, 1895
Oil on canvas 65 x 80 cm Art Institute Chicago
Form: According to art critic Robert Hughes;
Cezanne admired the Impressionists, especially Pissarro and Renoir, and derived inspiration from them; it is hardly possible to imagine his landscapes of the 1870s without their quantum of Impressionist freshness. But the whole thrust of his work is about something other than the delight in the fleeting moment, the "effect" of light, color and atmosphere, to which Impressionism was dedicated. Underneath the delectable surface was structure, like reefs and rocks beneath a smiling sea, and that was what Cezanne sought and obsessively analyzed--the bones and masses of the world. His famous remark about seeking in nature "the cylinder, the sphere, the cone" need not be taken literally--he was never a geometric painter, still less an abstract one, though later abstractionists would build on his work. And yet his greatest paintings bear abstract constructions of tremendous amplitude and sureness. Early Cezanne the stumblebum turned into one of the finest manipulators of paint who has ever lived. Perhaps manipulator is the wrong word--it suggests trickery, whereas in Cezanne the relation between the paint surface and the imagined surface of the object (a rock, the side of a house, an apple) is astonishingly direct and candid. This doesn't come across in reproduction. It rises from the paint itself, that discreet paste in which every trace left by the brush seems to help create the impression of solidity, so that you feel you could pick the apple--which is both a rosy sphere of light and a ball as heavy as plutonium--off the table. And yet the surface is never closed, never overdetermined; that is part of the magic. Modernism's patriarch. by Robert Hughes, Time, 6/10/96, Vol. 147 Issue 24, p72, 4p, 7c CEZANNE, Paul -- Exhibitions; ART museums -- Pennsylvania -- Philadelphia
Iconography: Cezannes' still life works were the beginning of cubism. They are often credited with inspiring Artists like Picasso and Braque to go further with the ideas that Cezanne had already laid out. When one looks at these still life's', one is inclined to say that Cezanne could not draw accurately. The left side of the table does not meet up with the right, the wine bottle is misshapen, and the fruit looks like it is in danger of rolling off the tilted tabletop. But, according to Stokstad, it wasn't that he couldn't draw, it was Cezanne showing 'willful disregard for the rules of traditional scientific perspective.' They say that he is merely observing the still life from many different angles and attempting to incorporate them all into a cohesive whole. As Cezanne would say, " Something other than realty-a construction after nature.'
Context: According to art critic Robert Hughes,
"The greater the artist the greater the doubt; perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize. "As a painter, I become more lucid in front of Nature," Paul Cezanne wrote to his son in 1906, the last year of his life. "But that realization of my sensations is always very painful. I cannot attain the intensity which unfolds to my senses. I don't have that magnificent richness of coloration which animates nature." As Picasso famously said, it's Cezannes anxiety that is so interesting. But not only the anxiety. There are anxious mediocrity's too. It's the achievement that counts. If Cezanne was not a heroic painter, the word means nothing. This was evident to some of his friends and contemporaries, such as Emile Zola. They saw, as later generations have seen, that his painting was also a moral struggle, in which the search for identity fused with the desire to make the strongest possible images of the Other--Nature--under the continuous inspiration and admonishment of an art tradition that he revered. He compared himself, not quite jokingly, to Moses: "I work doggedly, I glimpse the promised land. Will I be like the great Hebrew leader, or will I be able to enter it? "He was indeed the Moses of late 19th century art, the conflicted, inspired, sometimes enraged patriarch who led painting toward Modernism--a deceptive Canaan sometimes, not always flowing with milk and honey, but radically new territory all the same. The essential point, however, is that just as Moses died before reaching Canaan, so Cezanne never lived to see Modernism take hold--and he might not have liked what he saw, had he lived. It used to be one of the standard tropes of art history that Cezanne "begat" Cubism, and it is a fact that no serious painter since 1890 has been able to work without reckoning with Cezanne. But the idea that Cubism completed what Cezanne began is an illusion. It may be that Cezanne was reaching for a kind of expression in painting that did not exist in his time and still does not in ours. Instead of theory, he had "sensation," the experience of being up against the world--fugitive and yet painfully solid, imperious in its thereness and constantly, unrelentingly new. There was painting before Cezanne and painting after him, and they were not the same. But Cezanne's own painting matters more than its consequences. Inevitably, this deep innovator claimed he invented nothing. "In my opinion one doesn't replace the past, one adds a new link to it."Yes and no. Modernism's patriarch. by Robert Hughes, Time, 6/10/96, Vol. 147 Issue 24, p72, 4p, 7c CEZANNE, Paul -- Exhibitions; ART museums -- Pennsylvania -- Philadelphia
Cezanne, Paul Mont Sainte-Victoire 1885-1895
Oil on canvas 28 5/8 x 38 1/8 in.
The Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania
Paul Cezanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire 1885-1895
Oil on canvas 25 x 32 in.
Private Collection Pennsylvania
Form: The brushstrokes are more deliberate and planned than those of the Impressionists, he is not merely trying to be painterly, but to record the 'sensations' of nature.Iconography: This was a mountain near Cezannes home in France, and he painted it over thirty times during his life. According to Stokstad, The even lighting and still atmosphere makes these paintings more enduring when compared to way Impressionists are always trying to capture the 'moment'. Cezanne wanted to capture a sense of timelessness and solidarity with this impressive landscape. On the top painting, the trees in the foreground help to create the illusion of depth and underscore the immensity of the mountains. Even on the bottom painting, which is much looser and more abstracted, we find the mass of trees in front, and a vast expanse of land stretching back toward the imposing hills.
Context: According to art critic Robert Hughes,
Cezanne has often been called a universal artist, but you cannot grasp his work unless you realize that he was a deeply local one as well. He was not just French but southern Mediterranean French, a Provencal; and the obsessive, enduring, reinforcing sense of the particular landscape of his cultural memory is wound into his work so far as to completely remove it from the domain of pure, unsymbolic form. In a sense it is part of the great movement away from the national toward the local that characterized so much of European, including French, culture in the latter half of the 19th century. You feel it particularly in Cezanne's series of landscapes of his "sacred mountain," Mont Sainte-Victoire. Now it is a mere shimmer of profile in a watercolor, whose blank paper becomes the white light of the Midi, burning through the pale flecks of color. Elsewhere, in the late oils, it achieves a tremendous faceted density, that crouched lion of rock. In between there are lyrical tributes to it, as in Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Bellevue, 1882-85, where it appears almost shyly on the left of a tender, early springtime landscape, all new green, traversed by an aqueduct (sign of the ancient Roman roots of Provence) and crossed by a pale road whose kinks are tied to the branch forms of the pine that rises in the foreground to bisect the canvas.
Blue Star Contemporary Art Center in San Antonio, Texas has several gallery spaces , project spaces, and arts programs.
Blue Star Contemporary will have an Open Call in January 2017 for 4 artists for their 3 month Berlin Residency --find details here. They are also exhibiting artists, now and into 2019, in a major city airport--find out more here.
The Blue Star Contemporary open call for National & International Artists invites you to submit a portfolio of your work to be considered for exhibition opportunities--the next call will open in the Spring of 2017. Blue Star exhibitions are curated from the pool of the top 10% of artists who submit their work.
To find out more about the many programs of Blue Star Contemporary Art Center click here.
Blue Star Open Call Opportunities for Artists here.
Plan ahead in 2017. Keep up with thousands of opportunities in our International Art Gallery Directory e-list. In this e-list we've color highlighted art galleries accepting submissions and have added their submission guidelines and links to their guidelines for artists to review. If you are an artist you can quickly locate more opportunities for their art in the International Art Gallery Directory e-list available here and here.
It is with a heavy heart that I write to extend my condolences to the many members of our community who were affected by the fire at the Ghost Ship warehouse in Oakland this weekend. The magnitude of this tragedy cannot be overstated.
As we begin the process of mourning, let’s remember that the fire did not destroy our ability to come together, to show up as a community, and to create. Artist-run spaces make culture in the Bay Area and in cities around the world. As artists and cultural workers, we will not let fire or the ongoing violence of gentrification defeat our creative communities. We will hold each other tighter, and we will continue making work that inspires change in the world.
In the days ahead, please reach out to me directly if there is anything that SOMArts can do to support those most impacted by this tragedy, including offering space to gather and mourn. I encourage you to donate to the relief fundstarted by Gray Area Foundation for the Arts.
Sincerely,
Maria Jenson Executive Director, SOMArts
Visit Us! 934 Brannan St. (between 8th &9th) San Francisco, CA 94103
Support Those Affected by the Oakland Ghost Ship Fire
As the names and numbers of the dead from the Ghost Ship fire are announced, the devastation gets deeper and more overwhelming. Please consider supporting relief efforts – these two funds seem to be actively and thoughtfully working with all involved to responsibly allocate your donations:
Fire Relief Fund – donations will go toward funeral, medical, and health-related expenses for victims and survivors
Residents' Support Fund – donations will go to the former residents of the Ghost Ship, directly funding supplies and materials needed to support their livelihood
If a space is needed for a memorial gathering or fundraiser, please send us an email, call 415-863-2141, or feel free to drop by during office hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 11 to 6 PM. We would like to make Southern Exposure available.
Dear Ones,
On Saturday, we awoke to the news that a catastrophic fire ripped through the Ghost Ship warehouse in Oakland where musicians and artists – friends counted among them – had gathered for a concert. As I write this, the death toll has climbed to 36 and is expected to rise. A wave of grief, tenderness, and shock ripples through every form of communication I’ve read in the past three days. It will not subside soon; it is present in my words to you here.
A criminal investigation is already underway into the illegality and fire code violations of the live-work spaces occupying the warehouse. But even in mainstream media accounts such as the New York Times, the large-scale displacement of artists in the Bay Area is held out as an underlying cause of the fire. Artists cope with precarious housing because economic violence inflicts precariousness upon them.
The idea that Southern Exposure is yours to claim takes on new meaning in the wake of this tragedy and the precariousness that caused it. We strive to be a place that defies the economic violence that so indifferently devalues and eradicates the work of artists. We seek to be a place where artists find welcome and unfettered expression. We hope to be a place that they can reshape in their own image.
With those goals in mind, we extend several invitations at once: Please join us this Friday for the opening of a powerful new exhibition. Please stake your claim in Southern Exposure. Please support our friends and their loved ones in their time of grief. Please know how dear you are to us. We are everything we are because of you.
With gratitude and care,
Patricia, on behalf of the staff and Board of Southern Exposure
Young Queens on the Rise
We have our own voice here. – Jazmine Alcaraz, 16
Join us this Friday for the opening of a powerful youth art exhibition – They Love Our Culture. They Hate Our People | Aman a nuestra cultura. Odian a nuestra gente. The featured artists, participants in SoEx’s Community Arts Internship Program (CAIP), are using the exhibition space to turn a critical eye to pressing issues including state-sanctioned violence, racism, and violence against women.
This fall, CAIP partnered with the Young Queens on the Rise program of Mission Girls, a neighborhood organization with a focus on educating and empowering girls ages 9-24. Recognizing the ways in which our mission and values are complementary, the San Francisco Arts Commission awarded this partnership a 2016 Artists and Communities in Partnership grant. Read more in the most recent issue of El Tecolote, the Mission's bilingual neighborhood newspaper.
Each year, Southern Exposure works with more than 500 youth artists between the ages of 12 and 21 and employs more than 20 teaching artists. By staking a claim in SoEx and the youth art education programs that are an integral part of our mission and programs, you support the artists of tomorrow. Please give today.
Claim SoEx – Donate Today
Choose a place you would like to own. Create a deed to hold up as a sign showing you belong to that place and it belongs to you. – The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project
Southern Exposure 3030 20th Street San Francisco, CA 94110
This painting is important because it is one of the earliest
paintings to be made with oil paint. Previously to this, paintings were usually
made either with egg tempera or were fresco on plaster walls.
This painting was created with an underpainting of egg
tempera and then successive glazes of thin transparent layers of color were
applied using a mixture of pigments and linseed oil. This technique of using oil paint allows the
artist to be able to shade and blend more accurately and realistically.
Although linear perspective was being used by artists in
Italy, Jan van Eyck does not seem to use a consistent system of linear
perspective in his painting. Probably, because the painting is a combination of
studies of different objects in the room such as, the chandelier and the
mirror.
You’ll also see that there is no consistent single point in
which all the parallel lines converge on, also known as the “vanishing point.”
This painting is also important because it is probably
titled incorrectly.
Irwin Panofsky, and art historian in the early to middle
parts of the 20th century, base the title “The Arnolfini Wedding
Portrait,” on finding an obscure reference to a wedding between two people from
Italy wall they were staying in the northern part of Europe known as Flanders.
Years later another historian placed the wedding in 1447, 13
years after the date on the double portrait and six years after van Eyck's
death. So interestingly enough the analysis of the symbols and the subject
matter of the painting by Irwin Panofsky is probably incorrect, however, some
historians insist on teaching the older interpretation of this painting.
Panofsky’s interpretation of this painting is that it’s a
couple getting married in the sacred wedding chamber. The poses of the two
individuals indicate that the woman is putting her hand in the hands of her new
husband. The bare feet represent that they are on scared ground and this is a
sacred event.
The placement of the woman near the bed and the man near the
window has significance for Panofsky as well in which he thought that it was a
representation of what they did as a couple. The wife stayed home near the
bedroom, and the husband usually leaves the home and is in a different realm.
The chandelier with a single candle has been discussed a lot maybe it’s
supposed to represent the light of God.
The dog might represent fidelity.
The green of the gown could represent spring time and fertility. The woman is not pregnant but the extra
amount of material in her gown is held up against her stomach and at a glance
could be mistaken for the stomach of a pregnant woman.
The mirror in the background contains the back of the two
figures and the artist who is painting the couple’s portrait, the reflection
combined with the inscription that translates “Jan van Eyck was here.” for
Panofsky this could be interpreted as Jan van Eyck witnessing the wedding
contract.
The above interpretation is probably incorrect since it is
based on incorrect information.
An alternative theory of what the painting means is that the
painting represents a kind of scene of everyday life called by art historians
as a “genre scene.” It is possible that
it is a kind of sarcastic statement about wealth and morality. That the scene might be an indictment of the
wealth of some Renaissance businessmen.
The obvious wealth of the clothing, furniture and other items, even the
dog is a type of “toy” dog and might be just a rich person’s plaything.
Printmaking and the ReformationFor all the videos in order with a textbook and study guides please visit: http://art-and-art-history-academy.usefedora.com/
Engraving Depicting a Renaissance Printmaking Shop
Context: One of the major innovations of the Renaissance, much like our own information revolution concerning the internet, was the invention of the movable type printing press. Two majors forms had been around for several hundred years already. Engraving and woodblock printing but this innovation was something new.The movable type printing press, perfected most likely by Johannes Gutenberg (1398-1468), created an information revolution. What made the movable type printing press so significant was the fact that it used reusable interchangable parts to create pages of texts. In the large illustration on the left is a man putting precarved blocks (made out of medal or wood) in to small compartments in a larger tray. Above the tray is the original manuscript which he is "typesetting." The page once it had been set would be run through a printing press for a series of images and then once enough copies had been made, the block would be dumped out, sorted and then reused in another page.
The major benefit to this process is speed and economy. Since the individual pages didn't need to be carved from scratch, half the time was needed to print off a series of pages. It was also cheaper because less labor and materials were needed.
In the past, books and especially the Bible, were often hand made. Monks or scribes would hand copy and decorate each page individually and the major producer or publisher of such manuscripts was the Catholic Church. With this new technology, wealthy individuals could now afford to print off multiple sets of books and flyers with their ideas. The text of the Bible, whose cost was prohibitively expensive and also outlawed to anyone but the Cathloic clergy, could now be printed up at much less cost. The equivalenyt of these events would be our ability to send off a mass e-mail, print out multiple copies of a flyer at a copy shop and or post documents to the web. This is called "self-publishing."
New books were now being published and copies of Gutenberg's famous Bible were being mass produced and this lead to the beginning of the Protestant Reformation in the North of Europe and the writings of Martin Luther who used this movable type press to circulate his ideas. This lead to the "Reformation"
Martin Luther was the leader of the religious movement known as the Reformation. After reading a passage in the Book of Romans, he had a greater understanding about the judgment of God—basically that anyone could go straight to God and ask for forgiveness for their sins. This, of course, went against what Catholicism taught which was that people could only speak to God through an intermediary (usually a priest) and that the only way to get a speedy ticket out of Purgatory was to buy one’s way out. This led Luther to write the "95 Theses."
There was a great outcry against Luther by the Pope about the "95 Theses." This led Luther to write three manifestos – the first of which was an open letter to the Christian Nobility. This letter appealed to the noblemen of Germany to hear his beliefs and try to persuade the people who still followed the “Romanists” (Catholics).
In this manifesto, Luther uses a metaphor of three walls to describe what is seemingly a catch-22 situation. The Pope was all-powerful and was the only one who could translate the Bible. If a person wished to challenge this, they would have to call a council – and the only person who could call council was the Pope! Luther dispels this belief with his teachings.
According to the Britannica Encyclopedia:
The role of Luther Luther said that what differentiated him from previous reformers was that they attacked the life, he the doctrine of the church. Whereas they denounced the sins of churchmen, he was disillusioned by the whole scholastic scheme of redemption. The assumption was that man could erase his sins one by one through confession and absolution in the sacrament of penance. Luther discovered that he could not remember or even recognize all of his sins, and the attempt to dispose of them one by one was like trying to cure smallpox by picking off the scabs. Indeed, he believed that the whole man was sick. The church, however, held that the individual was not too sick to make up for bad deeds by some good deeds. God gave to all a measure of grace. If human beings lay hold of it and did the best they could, God would reward them with a further gift of grace with which they could perform deeds of genuine merit, which would give them credit before God. Human beings might even die with more than enough credits for salvation. These extra credits constituted a treasury of the merits of the saints, from which the pope could make transfers to those whose accounts were in arrears. The transfer was called an indulgence and for this, in Luther's day, the grateful recipient made a contribution to the church.
Lucas Cranach the Elder.
"Passional Christi und Antichristi."
Woodcut. 1521.
Northern Renaissance, Germany
Matthew Chapter 21
12 Jesus entered the temple area and drove out all those
engaged in selling and buying there. He overturned the tables
of the money changers and the seats of those who were selling doves.
13 And he said to them, "It is written: 'My house shall be a house of
prayer,' but you are making it a den of thieves."
Form: These are two prints presented in the form of a diptych (two images side by side). The two images by Lucas Cranach demonstrate a large amount of fine detail even though this is hard to do with woodcut printmaking.
The images also demonstrate that by this time linear perspective and anatomical accuracy were common place expectations for almost all art.
Iconography: The image on the left depicts Jesus in the manner to which the audiences of the Renaissance would have come to expect him and his disciples to look like. He is a young bearded man in a robe; however, the people he thrashes are all wearing clothing contemporary to Germany in the 1500's. The temples architecture is also familiar and typical for a church from the 16th century. This is designed to draw the audience in and make them identify with the sinners in the image. This device is referred to as a genre element. Art historians use the term genre to describe images that depict people and events from everyday life.
The right hand image shows a scene similarly useing genre elements in which the Pope (who wears the Papal tiara or crown) is seated on a comfortable cushion while he is surrounded by his bishops (note the hats).
In this picture from a Lutheran devotional (and propagandist) booklet, Christ (on the left) is driving the moneychangers out of the temple, in contrast to the Pope, who is shown as a hawker of indulgences. The picture originated as a woodcut by Lucas Cranach the Elder the court painter for the Elector of Saxony and a close friend of Luther's.
Context: The image at left is a representation of this Bible passage from the book of Matthew. Cranach and Luther got together on this one to illustrate the text from the Bible but also to update it. This image would have been distributed as a piece of propaganda against the Catholic Church and used to illustrate Luther's new and radical ideas.
Had television existed in the 16th century, the daily dose of political attack ads might have shown spots of Martin Luther as saint and the pope as sinner!People who use the phrase "politics as usual" when they are disgusted by the mudslinging and outrageous claims of political commercials probably don't realize just how "usual" that really is. The modern mass media campaign of charge and countercharge originated not in the smoke-filled rooms of political parties but in the Protestant-Roman Catholic struggle of the Reformation.
The printing press was barely 70 year s old when Martin Luther and his supporters turned it into an awesome tool--and weapon--for the spread of the Lutheran understanding of the gospel. They used every trick in today's campaign adviser's book to advance their cause, and their Catholic opponents responded in kind.
A commercial this summer framed an upbeat President Clinton against a bright blue sky, while Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich were shown in black-and-white with frowns on their faces. In similar fashion, 16th century folk were treated to woodcuts of Luther, Bible in hand, surrounded by a halo of sanctity and overshadowed by the hovering dove of the Spirit. His "opponent," the pope, was cast as a servant of the devil, enthroned in hell.
One of the most famous attack ad woodcuts commissioned by Luther pairs the scene of Christ driving the money-changers from the temple with a view of the pope receiving indulgence money. Sound familiar? It's not unlike a recent commercial depicting Clinton wanting more and more tax money, while Dole drives the wicked "taxers and spenders" away.In his contributions to this media melee, Luther didn't hesitate to depict his opponents in the worst possible light or to put a highly favorable "spin" on the efforts and beliefs of his side.
Yet, in even his angriest publications, Luther always offered profound teachings about the gospel. He could never just attack. He had to preach and teach as well.
Would that the modern media campaigns imitate less Luther's trashing of opponents and more his presentation of issues that really matter.
Albrecht DÜRER, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. 1498 Woodcut, 39 x 28 cm
(Revelation 6:1-8:) Conquest, War, Plague and Famine, Death
Iconography: Stokstad describes the iconography of this image as a "moral lesson on the power of evil" but more than that, Stokstad discusses the use of images of witches in his images as an expression of evil. It is interesting that this is one of the roles that older, perhaps unattractive woman were accused of during the Renaissance and well into the 1800's. In some ways, the depiction of witches in the art of the Renaissance represents the anti-ideal for a woman. In this way, woman are still provided with a role model of what not to become.
Form and Context:
Woodcut is the technique of printing designs from planks of wood. . . It is one of the oldest methods of making prints from a relief surface, having been used in China to decorate textiles since the 5th century AD. In Europe, printing from wood blocks on textiles was known from the early 14th century, but it had little development until paper began to be manufactured in France and Germany at the end of the 14th century. . . In Bavaria, Austria, and Bohemia, religious images and playing cards were first made from wood blocks in the early 15th century, and the development of printing from movable type led to widespread use of woodcut illustrations in the Netherlands and in Italy. With the 16th century, black-line woodcut reached its greatest perfection with Albrecht Dürer and his followers Lucas Cranach and Hans Holbein. In the Netherlands Lucas van Leyden and in Italy Jacopo de' Barbari and Domenico Campagnola, who were, like Dürer, engravers on copper, also made woodcuts.As wood is a natural material, its structure varies enormously and this exercises a strong influence on the cutting. Wood blocks are cut plankwise. The woods most often used are pear, rose, pine, apple, and beech. The old masters preferred fine-grained hardwoods because they allow finer detail work than softwoods, but modern printmakers value the coarse grain of softwoods and often incorporate it into the design.
The printing of woodcuts is a relatively simple process because it does not require great pressure. Although presses are used, even hand rubbing with a wooden spoon can produce a good print. The ink used to print woodcuts must be fairly solid and sticky, so that it lies on the surface without flowing into the hollows. The printing ink can be deposited on the relief either with dabbers or with rollers. Thinner papers are particularly suitable for woodcuts because they make rich prints without heavy pressure.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Albrecht DÜRER,
The Knight, Death and The Devil
1513-14 Copper engraving, 25 x 19 cm
Form: In this variation of the theme, the two figures are nude and the total environment is much more worked out. This image indicates a fairly good use of anatomy and perspective and shows more of a development of the mark making discussed in Grien's drawing. The development of the vocabulary of marks would have been important for Grien to be able to make a high quality engraving.
Engraving
In engraving, the design is cut into metal with a graver or burin. The burin is a steel rod with a square or lozenge-shaped section and a slightly bent shank. The cutting is accomplished by pushing the burin into the metal plate. The deeper it penetrates into the metal, the wider the line; variations in depth create the swelling tapering character of the engraved line. After the engraving is finished, the slight burr raised by the graver is cleaned off with a scraper. The engraved line is so sharp and clean that it asserts itself even if cut over a densely etched area. In the print, the engraved line is notable for its precision and intensity. In engraving, the hand does not move freely in any direction but pushes the graver forward in a line; a change of direction is achieved by the manipulation of the plate with the other hand. Although copper, zinc, aluminum, and magnesium plates are used--and in the past soft iron and even steel were used--the best all-around metal is copper. It has the most consistent structure and is neither too soft nor too hard.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Context: In the North, places like Germany, France and Holland, the art market was a bit different than in Italy. Although the Reformation did not officially begin until 1518, there were stirrings of it earlier than that.
In Northern towns and cities, there was a different distrubution of wealth and probably a larger upper middle class than in Italy. In addition to these factors, the main patron for the arts was in Italy in the Churches of Rome, Padua and Florence. Since individuals could afford to buy work for smaller prices many artists sought out this different market. The print market allowed artists to sell multiple copies of the same images to a larger number of people and make as much money from it as the sale of one or two paintings.
This also freed some of the artists from the typical more Catholic or overtly religious iconography of much of the art of the South and allowed them to explore other kinds of imagery and subjects.
For more info on printmaking go here; http://faculty.indy.cc.ks.us/jnull/valueprintintaglio2.htm
Albrecht DÜRER,
The Knight, Death and The Devil
1513-14 Copper engraving, 25 x 19 cm
Iconography:
"Though the imagery of his Knight, Death and the Devil is influenced by his travels to Italy, the rich iconography is an element of his Northern upbringing. The knight represents the "good Christian soldier", who is traveling through the "forest of darkness" to arrive at the "kingdom of light". On his way, he encounters Death (the old man with serpents for hair) and the Devil (the single-horned goat), but he does not even give them a moment's glance. He is steadfast in his aim, accompanied by his faithful dog (representing loyalty). There is a small lizard below the hind legs of his horse going the opposite direction. Anything reptilian generally connotes evil in Christian iconography, and also serves to emphasize that his is going the right direction. In the left corner is a skull, symbolic of the fate of all mankind, just above Albrecht Durer's signature, "A.D." http://www.urtonart.com/history/Renaissance/northrenaiss.htm
See how it relates to this hymn. Go here for the melody http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/o/n/onwardcs.htm
Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus going on before.
Christ, the royal Master, leads against the foe;
Forward into battle see His banners go!
Refrain
Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus going on before.
At the sign of triumph Satan’s host doth flee;
On then, Christian soldiers, on to victory!
Hell’s foundations quiver at the shout of praise;
Brothers lift your voices, loud your anthems raise.
Refrain
Like a mighty army moves the church of God;
Brothers, we are treading where the saints have trod.
We are not divided, all one body we,
One in hope and doctrine, one in charity.
Refrain
What the saints established that I hold for true.
What the saints believ'd, that I believe too.
Long as earth endureth, men the faith will hold,
Kingdoms, nations, empires, in destruction rolled.
Refrain
Crowns and thrones may perish, kingdoms rise and wane,
But the church of Jesus constant will remain.
Gates of hell can never gainst that church prevail;
We have Christ’s own promise, and that cannot fail.
Refrain
Onward then, ye people, join our happy throng,
Blend with ours your voices in the triumph song.
Glory, laud and honor unto Christ the King,
This through countless ages men and angels sing.
Refrain
If you're an artist who wants to sell your own, start by seeing what it feels like by buying another artist's work. I think it gave me a lot of perspective. I suggest going on etsy or ebay and buying something within your budget.
Call for Applicants: White Leaves Artist Residency (Northern NM)
Deadline: April 1st, 2017
The White Leaves Artist Residency Program annually awards 2-3 artists the unique opportunity to concentrate on their work in the isolated, rural environment of the high desert landscape near El Rito, New Mexico. Open to artists working in all mediums who wish to develop or complete a project of their choosing, residency length ranges from 10-21 days during either a Fall (Sept-Nov) or Spring (April-June) session. Accommodations include a small private cabin with solar power and potable water, kitchen and shower access with additional outbuilding workspaces available based upon the needs of the artist. Residents also receive an edition of archival pigment prints of work that was created during their stay (sponsored by Frontier Fine Art Printing).
Call for Applicants: White Leaves Artist Residency (Northern NM) 