Nom de Plume

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.

For those of us living in South Seattle, good picture framing services are hard to come by without major traveling. I had been using the Columbia City Art Gallery’s services, but they have very limited hours — and the guy was never there during the four hours a day they are open. Then I stumbled upon The Mitered Corner, which is owned and operated by a delightful woman named Terry (whose mother does the books). Terry is a real gem–not only does she do beautiful work, but she’s also great about making recommendations about what will look good. When I dropped off four prints two weeks ago, I spent an hour there chatting, looking and frames and matting, and chatting some more. And here are the results:

Terry also recycles matboard; instead of throwing away the scraps, she precuts them into various sizes and sells them for a couple of dollars each. This was a godsend, with all those woodblock Christmas cards; I framed a good number of them — complete with conservation matting — for a very modest price.

At risk of sounding like a blogomercial, I am so pleased and can’t recommend her highly enough.

This is for Barbara.