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read the Printmaking and Graphic Design Sections, as well as Chapters 6 and 9 in Artforms.
In this week’s Discussion compare and contrast Kitagawa Utamaro’s A Competitive Showing of Beauties (discussed in this week’s Module) with Mary Cassatt’s print titled The Letter, discussed in Artforms.
• Tell us how Utamaro’s artwork came to influence the Impressionists.
• Discuss the elements and principles of design in Utamaro’s woodblock print which influenced Mary Cassatt’s print.
• Be specific when you describe the prints: tell us which areas of the print you are describing.
• Include an image of either Utamaro’s or Cassatt’s other prints, not one that we discuss here, so we can see their other artworks.
In your own words please write a minimum 200 words in an essay (not numbered paragraphs).
Please do not include the Discussion questions in your essay. As always, your descriptions should include elements and principles of design.
Respond by Thursday at 11:55 p.m; respond to at least one other student’s or my additional post by Sunday at 11:55 p.m., for a total possible 50 points.
Many of you are submitting terrific Discussion responses: well-written; answer all the questions; and oftentimes stretch the discussions. You stretch my understanding of the materials we study as well. Kudos!
Just checking…Do you know that if you post late, after the Thursday night deadline, you lose a minimum 40 points because your aren’t participating fully in the week-long Discussion? Do you know that you automatically lose 20 points if you don’t post a substantive response to another student or my supplemental questions?
Printmaking
We’ll look at the mediums of printmaking and graphic design this week. Please read Chapter 6 in Artforms to learn about the printmaking process; and, skipping Chapters 7 and 8, jump to Chapter 9 to read about graphic design.
As a kid, did you make stamps from potatoes then dip them into ink or paint and press the potato stamp onto paper? Stamping is generally thought of as a printmaking process. Prints can be made from the simplest or most intricate of methods. Cut vegetables, incised erasers, the rim of a jar all will produce an image when dipped in a medium such as ink or paint then applied to a surface. Or a print may be created with a complicated process of etched plates, acid baths and presses. A linoleum block print, such as the one above by Dave Lefner, may be passed through a printing press several times to achieve a multi-color print.
Multi-color prints are difficult to produce. Usually one plate or woodblock per color is created. The difficulty in creating multi-color prints is in lining up each plate so the colors don’t overlap as each color is printed, called registering. Even the black lines in the print below must be perfectly registered with the colors. How many plates do you think the Japanese artist, Utamaro, used to create “Midnight: Hours of the Rat, Mother and Sleepy Child” below?
Ukiyo-e refers to a genre of woodblock prints made in Japan during the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Utamaro’s second woodblock print above is a good example of an ukiyo-e print. It shows a Japanese woman dressing. She holds a scarf between her lips, likely to spare her lipstick from smearing as she dressed. It is one of his series of prints entitled A Competitive Showing of Beauties.
Each print in the series is different. And the series was printed many times in separate editions. For example:
12 individual prints = 1 series
1 series printed 10 times = 10 editions
Unique to the print medium, editions can be printed fairly easily and quickly. While this may drive down the price of a single print, it allows for easy distribution of a single image and whole editions. This was the case of Utamaro’s ukiyo-e prints. Many years after they were printed, ukiyo-e prints reached and influenced the European Impressionists, including painter and printmaker, Mary Cassatt.
Why would seeing Japanese prints be important to an Impressionist painter in the late 1800s? European artists were accustomed to more realistic images which seemed to have volume, placed into spaces which receded into the picture plane. From ukiyo-e prints the Impressionists learned the use of asymmetrical compositions which drew the eye into the picture; as well as the use of shapes of flat color and line. Utamaro’s prints were composed of large, bold shapes of color outlined in black, which flattened the image.
The Japanese artist also used line to direct the eye through the print. The lines which outline the images also make the print look flat. Instead of objects which appear to recede into the picture plane as we see in European paintings which utilized perspective, these Japanese woodcuts flatten space. All the objects appear to be on the same flat plane. And they typically placed figures in interior settings.
Hatching was reserved for a hairline, not to create volume as da Vinci had done. Nothing was done to add the illusion of volume to the shapes. The fine hatching at the nape of her hair shows Utamaro’s great talent and control of the printmaking medium and use of the woodblock. It is extremely difficult to attain such fine detail using a woodblock!
In Mary Cassat’s print in Artforms, The Letter, you see an Asian woman sitting at a desk. She holds an envelope to her mouth; it appears she may be licking the glue on the edge. Except for the upright side of the desk, all the images in Cassatt’s print lie at angles to the print’s edges. These competing angles activate the surface causing your eye to bounce from one object to the next. But, the print appears flat, nothing really recedes into the picture plane.
Both artists successfully use asymmetrical balance, sides of each print are not the same. The artists use color (the woman’s blue dress across from the block of color in the upright desk) and varied lines (the robe of Utamaro’s woman have curving edges versus the hair ornaments which stop the eye from venturing off the page) to create asymmetrical balance.
Digital technology offers the artist new options in printmaking as well as the dilemma of completing or limiting an edition. Some artists are concerned their prints will lose value if the edition isn’t limited to a certain number. For other artists this isn’t an issue. Remember Shepard Fairey and his Andre the Giant (or ObeyGiant) posters that he posted all over Southern California? Turns out the millions of Obama/Hope posters that were produced didn’t hurt his reputation either!
Update:
Fairey’s “Hope” poster of Obama was inspired by a 2006 Associate Press [AP] photograph of the former senator. The AP subsequently accused the artist of copyright infringement; Fairey maintained that the use of the photo falls under fair-use laws. His response includes a dozen examples of AP photographs that consist almost entirely of copyrighted artwork made by Fairey and other artists. He stated, “I am fighting the AP to protect the rights of all artists … I am saying they have to be consistent. They can’t have it both ways. If AP photographs that do nothing but depict other artists’ work are protected by fair use, then my work has to be, too, because it’s at least as transformative, creative and expressive as the AP photos we identify in my response, if not much more so. If the AP has the right to do what it’s done, then so do I.”
Fairey later pleaded guilty to one count of criminal contempt for destroying documents, manufacturing evidence and other misconduct and was sentenced to probation.
Fairey continues to make street art and graphic design, recently the Rolling Stones commissioned him to create the image for their 50th Anniversary album cover.
A key phrase to remember regarding good design is that ‘form follows function’. For example: if you’re designing a poster with an elaborate and beautiful font or typeface, so elaborate it’s not legible, you have bad design. Why? Part of the ‘form’ of the poster (the typeface) does not contribute to the ‘function’ of the poster: to convey a message. Legible typeface is more important than elaborate and beautiful when you wish to convey a message. If the typeface isn’t legible the poster doesn’t fulfill its function.
Logos and corporate symbols permeate our lives. They are on: buildings, cars, t-shirts, toys, baby’s bibs (Got Milk?), it’s a long list! Have you thought about the message those corporations wish to convey with their logos and symbols? Artforms shows you Michael Bierut’s elegant solution for a new Saks Fifth Avenue logo. What the store sells is elegant as well. And NASA’s decision to change its logo from red (used in this culture on emergency vehicles and the color of blood) after the Challenger disaster, to blue, heavenly blue. The new logo included dancing lines which sends a more optimistic message to the public about its space program.
Raymond Loewy’s design philosophy MAYA, which means Most Advanced Yet Acceptable, sounds a little like ‘form follows function’, doesn’t it? I’m thinking of the first computer mouse, later redesigned to accommodate the human hand and deter tendon and muscle problems. Then those mice became wireless and had flashing lights and colorful roller balls, each part of its function. Now we’ve freed the mice and use only their pads…forget it, just touch the screen!
Think about how product design impacts your life throughout each day. It’s evThere is a simple, direct elegance in the political posters Artforms shows us. Silence = Death, 1986, doesn’t bombard us with the ravages of a disease, the blood and guts side of AIDS. Instead the artist seeks to move all of us to action with bold typeface and the hard reality of the issue.
The stories coming out of the southern African nation of Zimbabwe continue to be heart-wrenching. Please read carefully the journey Chaz Maviyane-Davies has taken in balancing his art and politics and life in the face of the dictator Robert Mugabe. Maviyane-Davies’ also offers poignant advice.
Maira Kalman and Rick Meyerowitz mix humor into their New Yorker cover page “Newyorkistan” which ‘maps’ the subcultures of Manhattan and environs. Humor as a communication tool can bridge gaps in a population and humanize those subcultures to their neighbors.
Be sure to read the next section regarding the movie you will find and view in time for next week’s Discussion deadlines.
