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

Today is Toulouse-Lautrec's birthday

Jardin de Paris, May Belfort, 1883
Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec
Lithograph

I probably don't need to write this as it is probably not news to anyone but Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was one of the greatest lithographers of all time. He fully embraced this printmaking medium and maximized its potential for illustration and poster design. He was among the artists who took the relatively new printmaking medium of lithography (in the late 19th century) and became one of the world's most famous lithographers. His masterful use of simplified color fields and expressive, painterly line compositions are as powerful today as they were in the 1800s.

Late 19th Century/Early 20th Century Lithography Timeline

The timeline above (click to embiggen) is a slide I made in grad school for a presentation on the history of lithography. You can see that Toulouse-Lautrec has a prominent spot on this timeline and yet he was accompanied by many other talented poster artists who exploded on the lithography scene in Europe and the U.S. near the close of the 19th century. Jules Cheret, who invented the 3-color lithographic process, paved the way for the other artists listed here including Toulouse-Lautrec.

If you are of the mind to look them up, these other artists include: Pierre Bonnard, Théophile Steinlen, Maxfield Parrish, Leonetto Cappiello, The Beggarstaffs, Lucian Bernhard, Eugène Grasset, Edward Penfield, William H. Bradley, among others. And in the early 20th century, the work of printmaker, designer, illustrator, painter and typographer, Cassandre became well known as his iconic lithographic travel posters of grand ships and advertisements for Dubonnet were produced and subsequently distributed internationally. In fact, designers in the late 20th century to the present, continue to draw inspiration from Cassandre's work. See Paula Scher's Audiophile promotion for CBS Records in 1980. And compare it to Cassandre's seen below. This is just one example, and there are more current ones where designers and illustrators continue to draw inspiration from Cassandre as well as other early lithographers.

L’intransigeant, 1925
A.M. Cassandre

With that all said, Happy Birthday Henri!

Z-Acryl Polyester Litho Plates

Back in March of last year, I posted some info on Pronto plates and mentioned a demo by Mirka H. on printing from Z-Acryl plates which are similar to Pronto plates. Well, Mirka H. has a new post up with some great added info based on testing she's done on Z-Acryl plates as well as close-up images of some of the prints based on her tests.

So, if you're interested in this process, check out her new post on what she's discovered using different materials to mark up her plates and how effective her results were. Her blog is at http://www.mirka-h.blogspot.com/.