A few weeks ago, a kindly soul pointed me in the direction of the Baren Forum, which is a consortium of printmakers and print lovers who create and exchange woodblock prints. Through them, I found a print by illustrator Annie Bissett that I really liked.
So I ordered it.
Considering that Steve would rather die than read my blog, I feel perfectly safe posting one of his presents. He’s been a little depressed lately, as we haven’t been surfing and he is relatively hobbyless as of late. I thought it might be nice to get him some “surfer art.”
The problem with most surfer art is that it’s truly dreadful–and the stuff I do like (i.e., Bartlett prints), I can’t afford.
Enter Tom Kristensen. An entirely self-taught printmaker from Australia, he was a passionate collector of ukiyo-e prints before he started creating his own stuff. (Artelino has an artist’s profile if you’re interested.) In 2004, he embarked on his project, 36 Views from Green Island, which can be seen at Saru Gallery. I predict that he will soon be as collectable as Paul Binnie.
I really like a lot of these–and would like to collect more–but this is the one I just ordered for Steve:
Last night I dreamt that my Saito woodblock print fell out of the frame, and I discovered that it wasn’t a print, but a painting. On looking closer, it wasn’t even a painting–it was cut out from a magazine.
I guess that’s a sign that I really need to get it reframed. My grandparents bought and framed it in the 1950s, long before acid free matting existed. I shudder to think of its condition.
More realistically, though, my dream probably reflects the two woodblock prints I did get framed and picked up yesterday. Excuse the pictures. Angling the camera was the only way to avoid picking up a reflection.
Here’s the Sachiko Furui that I bought in January or so:
And here’s my little Fumio Fujita print. Elizabeth helped choose the frame and matting, and she did a fabulous job:
Our neighbor, Nicki Hitz Edson, creates some of the most beautiful fiber art I’ve ever seen, including wall hangings and kimonos. A lot of her work has the same aesthetics found in Japanese prints–and so I love them. Alas, I can’t afford anything she does, although I really want to buy one of the kimonos for my mother. Perhaps one of these days … But in the meantime, I must content myself with posting some of her work.
See more at her web site.
Some of them make me want to weep with longing. Like Kiyoshi Saito’s Winter in Paris.
I am utterly.
Turns out that the print I coveted below is a rendition of a painting by a famous Canadian landscape artist named Lawren Harris. I know the print is different, I know it’s an interpretation, I know that it was inspired–and fully attributed to–the original.
Still, I can’t help but feel it’s cheating. Plus, compared to the painting, the print looks like a tawdry Elvis impersonator.
Here’s the original oil:
This is a series of prints by an artist named Tuula Moilanen who I think MUST be a yogalite. I think they’re pretty cute, and may even get one for my mother.
Available at the Verne Gallery.
Part of my ongoing obsession with woodblock prints.
Sachiko Furui is a Japanese artist living in the United States. Born in Osaka, she combines the perspective of a mid 20th century shin hanga print with a more abstract, loose aesthetic. I’m in love with her work in progress, A Hundred Views of America. There’s such a range of style. Here are just a few.
Little Italy, Delaware
Mystic, Connecticut
Old North Church, Massachusetts
Portsmouth, New Hampshire
You can view more of Sachiko’s work on her site or you can bite the bullet and purchase a print at Verne Gallery.
There are certain women writers that I lump together in my mind because of a certain sensibility they share: Margaret Atwood. Carol Shields. Anne Tyler. To this list, I add Alison Lurie, a writer who in my opinion doesn’t get enough credit. Many of her real killers are dated, often set in the sixties and seventies, with old-fashioned “hip” dialogue and some social constructs that the modern woman may not have a lot of patience with, or even sympathy for. Nonetheless, her stories still whiz along, and she brings a deep sympathy to her characters.
The Nowhere City was another of my Barnes and Noble freebies–remaindered reprints of a book originally published in 1965. Paul and Katherine Cattleman move to Los Angeles from the academic world of New England. He has failed to get a teaching position, and takes a year-long job as a historian for a large corporation. Katherine is unhappy about moving to LA, reacting against the city’s fakeness with acute sinusitis.
Paul is not a faithful husband; he never has been and feels no guilt about it. And the things Katherine hates about LA–the sense of not having a history, not being real–are the very things he loves. He enters into a deep affair with a “beatnik” who lives in the slum of Venice (in itself interesting to me, because the landmarks described are familiar to me, but it’s a different world from the gentrified Venice Beach of today).
Yet Katherine embarks on her own journey, complete with an affair with a psychiatrist who is estranged from his starlet wife. Lurie captures the arc of the Cattlemans’ marriage through Katherine and Paul’s affairs with others—and the person who is ultimately changed by the California experience is Katherine; she who hates LA comes to embrace it wholeheartedly, while he who loves it–at least at first–is the one who remains static. I loved that the unhappy wife is the person for whom vistas open.
Lurie also captures the essence of LA as I remember it: artificial, lacking in history, a place where normal arbiters of taste and morals are somehow placed in abeyance. I can’t remember everything I’ve read by Lurie, except for The War of the Tates. This was a much better book. And I’ve got another of hers to read, so stay tuned.
