Inspiration: Käthe Kollwitz

Käthe Kollwitz, Lithograph, Tod (Death), 1897

Käthe Kollwitz, Etching, After the Battle (Schlachtfeld), 1907

I recently took a stone lithography class with Devraj Dakoji at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop (RBPMW) and he has been (patiently) helping me print my stone from that class. I am very much a novice lithographer but I have been so inspired by the work of Käthe Kollwitz that I knew her work would act as a guide as I put litho crayon to stone.

Kollwitz's masterful use of shadow and light to evoke emotional responses to the plight of the people she depicts is as visually powerful today as it was over a hundred years ago. Her artistic subjects were derived from her world, what was going on around her: war, famine, disease and the gut-wrenching sorrow seen in the human condition during very difficult times.

I admire everything about Kollwitz's work: her ability to expertly render her subjects with empathy combined with a skillful hand, her expertise as a printmaker using the medium to maximize the dramatic and visceral reaction intended for the viewer, and her devotion to relaying the wrongs that she felt compelled to reveal through her art.

The two works above are a couple of my favorite pieces of Kollwitz's, especially the poignant etching, After the Battle, which by showing very little through use of a bit of light, speaks volumes about the poor woman on the battlefield searching for her loved one. I get chills and endless inspiration from this piece. Kollowitz's lithograph, Death, was my launching point for what I was trying to achieve with my own lithograph, The Road, shown below. I debated even showing my novice attempt at lithography but I thought it might be more relevant to a post about inspiration if I showed what the inspiration lead to.
So here is my humble and first lithographic homage to Käthe Kollwitz:

© 2013 Elana Goren
Lithograph, The Road

New Etching Series

I've been working on an etching series featuring animals being stalked by human shadows alluding to the deadly fate that they face daily in the human world.

By experimenting with textures and different acid resists I was able to achieve the eerie atmosphere in the prints that define the series.

This series was created with a mixture of effort to tap into my most gut-wrenching feelings about the plight of non-human animals in a human world as well as hints of satisfaction that I am finally dealing with political issues in my artwork that deeply matter to me.

It's not always easy to deal with deeply emotional and/or political issues when my muse is calling but again it's not very satisfying for me to skip lightly on the surface with little to say about what's down deep. I wonder how many other artists deal with this struggle.

UPDATE: The Huffington Post has been running a series of articles on a new book by Jonathan Safran Foer

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-gross/jonathan-safran-foers-con_b_333698.html

called Eating Animals. As Huff Po contributor, Dr. Andrew Weil, puts it, "Foer makes it clear that factory farming is the exceptional human activity that debases and destroys everything it touches: land, people, communities, and most of all, the innocents at the nexus, animals."

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-weil-md/the-moral-ferocity-of-eme_b_335811.html

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-weil-md/the-moral-ferocity-of-eme_b_335811.html