Nom de Plume

Now doesn’t THAT sound all art gallery-ish.

I have a ton of unframed prints I haven’t posted up at the house. Those that come with frames, I lug down to the shack and put up on the many bare walls. Which is where I am, and where my digital camera is, so ….

Eichii Kotozuka. I’m not a huge fan, with the exception of a couple of prints. She looks so young and tense, and the way her kimono is depicted is lovely. That said, if this hadn’t been dirt cheap, I probably wouldn’t have bought it:

Another one I wouldn’t have bought if it hadn’t been dirt cheap. But I have another print with a girl and rabbit, and it appealed to my whimsy to have two. The frame and glass are terrible, but the print itself is in good shape, notwithstanding the fact that someone folded the margins to make it fit in the frame. It looks much better outside the frame–but I have other prints I would rather spend money on framing, so back in it went.
Oh yes, this is Shuzo Ikeda.

Sometimes, one (that is the royal one, one understands) does not pay very close attention to the size of what one is bidding on–and one ends up paying a lot for two little “nothing” prints rather than not very much for two prints one knows nothing about but likes.

Sigh. I love Toshi Yoshida’s less representational stuff. Pencil titled, signed, and dated 1954. It needs to be reframed at some point, but I rather like it as is:

I just bought this Toshi Yoshida …

… and this Kiyoshi Nagai …

… and it occurs to me that I haven’t posted any of the prints I’ve bought in the past 6 to 8 months. So here they are.

A Mikumo print–which confuses me, because I thought Mikumo was a publisher. I like this print, but the main reason I bought it was because my great aunt Elaine had it. It reminds me of her little house in San Diego, with the huge deck built into a little green canyon.

I think I’m over the Tokuriki phase. The prints are quite pleasant, but some of them are just not very appealing. Like this one:

On the other hand, I really like this little Teruhide Kato:

Ditto Maekawa Senpan:

And I don’t really know why I ended up getting these three Kaoru Kawano prints at that auction house I like going to–other than the fact that they were dirt cheap. I don’t like Kawano. Every time I look at them, I get a creepy feeling. But here they are:

A while ago, I got an e-mail from someone who wanted to buy this Sekino print, which he had seen here:

I wasn’t that interested in selling, but he was really nice. We started e-mailing about Sekino prints. I sent him pictures of the other four I have, and he encouraged me to post pictures on the blog. So here they are:

And to make a long story short, he’s a serious collector who has been looking for this print for 10 years (in other words, he’s not a dilettante like me) and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. And while I like the print enormously, the fact is that he will get much more enjoyment out of it than I will. So I’m sending it off to him.

And I think I’m going to buy one of those Saitos I’ve been coveting.

I bought this during the last Georgetown Art Walk ( a month ago) and just picked it up tonight. The artist is Mark Lafalce and once again, my pictures don’t really do it justice.

Well, maybe one and a half. There is masking tape residue and staining at the top, but it’s pretty localized and the tape itself peeled up easily.

I have coveted this one for a while.

I like this too.

This one I wasn’t quite so wild about at first–it was part of the lot–but it’s now growing on me. Kind of like what appears to be a fungus on the upper lefthand margin.

My excuse for buying this Noda Kyuho print is that it’s for Steve, who sails.

Once again proving I am out of control, here are three prints I just had framed. BTW, I wasn’t sure if the Toshi Yoshida was pencil signed; it is.

Mom also sent me this Sekino bijin-ja for my birthday. Apparently, it was my grandfather’s favorite print. Hmmm, wonder why …

Also, Steve got me all sorts of great gifts for my birthday, but by far the best was Helen Merritt’s Guide to Modern Japanese Woodblock Prints. I am thrilled with it. On the other hand, you know you’re getting old and boring when you start requesting reference materials for gifts.

I can’t seem to scrape off all the glue without digging into the washi. I think I’m done. Let’s face it, these aren’t worth what I paid. Live and learn. I will still enjoy.

The cardboard backing of this one had 2-22-53 scrawled in pencil. This makes sense; according to the Doi publisher’s seal, was printed around the same time.

So those two Koitsu prints I bought off eBay? Stupid. They are completely glued to backing.

I am now performing surgery.

I’ve been a little out of control lately.

In addition to the Sekiguchi, I’ve also bought two Koitsu prints (either a really smart eBay buy or a really stupid one–I won’t know until I get them), a strange little bijin-ja that I know absolutely nothing about, and a Toshi Yoshida (a lifetime strike, but don’t know whether it’s pencil signed or printed).

And it occurs to me that I haven’t posted everything I’ve had reframed or bought. So here goes.

Reframed the Saito. The picture doesn’t do it justice. (Actually, none of my pictures do justice to the prints. Bear with me.)

Recycled the Saito frame on this Kiyoshi Nagai print.

Reused the existing frame on my beloved hot spring print, but added conservation materials to the inside. It’s on the wall next to my side of the bed, and I love looking at it.

Reframed the Narazaki (Nazaraki? I always mix it up) print. This was a hard, hard print to frame, and I’m still not completely sure I like it. Covering the margins seemed like a good idea at the time — it was very difficult finding a mat color that didn’t make it look weird — but I think I’m regretting it.

This lovely Seiichiro Konishi print has not been reframed at all — though it was probably framed in the seventies and needs its innards replaced with conservation materials.

There isn’t much information available about Seiichiro Konishi. If anyone knows more about him than is available on artelino, or can read the following, please let me know!

I’ve finally managed to articulate what it is I love about Japanese shin hana and sosaku hanga prints. Looking at them induces (in me at least) that sense of being nostalgic for the very moment you’re in. Just like autumn.

In any case.

Picked this lovely Sekiguchi print.

This guy is amazing; I love his woodblocks, which I found in the McClain’s gallery a few months ago. He had sold out of this particular print and I was mucho bummed. It reminds me of those wonderful Sekino self-portraits, but with a more contemporary twist. Now he’s found one.

And this …

Another eBay purchase.

The watanabe “sausage seal” on the right hand margin dates it to between 1929 and 1942. I haven’t seen any other prints online with the bottom set of characters on the left hand margin(as below). As far as I can tell, using the wonderful Shin Hanga Date Translation, it reads, “Made 17 March, 1933.” The print was originally created in 1932. I could be reading this wrong, but if anyone out there is more knowledgeable than I am (not hard), could you verify the date? Also, does anyone have any idea what the top set of characters is? HELP!!!

Last November, I ordered a Heisei edition of this print for a birthday present to myself– and then cancelled the order because I bought the new car. I’ve coveted this print ever since.

Last week, I found what I was pretty sure was an older edition on eBay, and managed to snag it. It came in the mail today, and I took it apart. The watanabe seal in the lower lefthand corner dates it to between 1946-57 (the print was originally published in 1935), and unfortunately, someone taped the edges down to the non-acid free matting. It’s also very, very faded.

I don’t know whether it’s worth having a conservator work some magic on it, but fortunately Floating World does free appraisals. I’m having fantasies about it being worth thousands of dollars, but I know that’s extremely unlikely. Still, a girl can dream …

***Update: It’s not worth having any conservation work done on it. The frame it came in was actually quite nice, so I’m having it reframed with the same materials, but adding some conservation matting on the inside and the back.

Thomas Hoving is the former director of the glorious Metropolitan Museum of Art, and I heard him on a podcast of Studio 360 a few weeks ago. He was actually talking about a new book he’s just written (detailing how to play a memorization-type game with famous paintings), but he mentioned this one, and I was riveted.

So. He talks about great art scams. Actually, his main point is that there are a lot more fakes out there than the average museum-goer ever realizes, and when it comes right down to it, the fakes themselves are antiques. Take the Romans, for instance. We all know that they weren’t creative enough to come up with their own gods. After all, Eros by any other name is still Eros. (Okay, okay, really bad pun, but only if you inflect it properly. If you don’t, it’s just incomprehensible. Look, it’s been a long day.) Fact is, they were good at building viaducts and expanding their Empire and stuff, but the creme de la creme of Roman society didn’t have viaducts and bloody heads in their living rooms. Nope. They had Greek art. And once real Greek art ran out, they had fake Greek art. Ditto everyone who came before them and after them — not Greek obviously, but whatever was old at the time. It’s kind of funny to think about, and it made me want to embrace popular art from Tar-jay and Ikea out of principle. Then I came to my senses.

Hoving isn’t that great a writer — and he certainly has a high opinion of himself — but this was a ravishing romp through the ages of art and the greatest scams of the past couple of centuries. Have a bit of fun; crack it open.

Marcy Merrill is a photographer who makes cameras out of old Altoids tins and comes up with the most amazing shots. I love them.

See the rest of her Pintoid Adventures.

Harry is a delightful woodblock printmaker who lives in England. I saw some of his prints online at baren forum, and then visited his site directly. I really, really like a lot of this–and so I asked whether I could buy some of his work. And lo and behold! I’m Harry’s first customer across the pond.

This is what I purchased:

And this is what Harry, bless the man, sent me along with it:

Aren’t they lovely?

This guy is amazing. Send in your pix and he’ll provide a free estimate on his blog.

This eBayer has the same card I just had framed.