Art I'm Looking At – "Woodcut: Primary Printmaking" at the Legion of Honor

On a recent visit to The Legion of Honor in San Francisco, I saw two good shows – "Japanese Prints in Transition: From the Floating World to the Modern World" (which closed August 18) and "Woodcut: Primary Printmaking" (which runs through October 20). I recently posted some comments about the first of these. Here are some highlights of the Woodcut show. 

On the basement floor at the Legion of Honor there are a couple of small side galleries that are easy to miss, but they are almost always rewarding. One of these often presents works owned by the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts (originally independent but now part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco), which has a fabulous collection of more than 90,000 works on paper. The Woodcut show is one such show.

The current show focuses on one printmaking process, the woodcut. "Woodcut" refers to a specific type of relief printing. A relief print is made from a surface from which the non-printing areas have been removed with a sharp tool leaving the original surface to carry the ink that forms the image (in this case the surface is a block of wood). The Japanese prints in the show mentioned above are an example of relief printing that uses multiple blocks, one each for each different color in the final image, but a woodcut may be made from any number of blocks or just one. 

This show now on at the Legion of Honor is not extensive but it draws on the Achenbach Foundation collection to give some idea of the range of expression woodcut allows. Here I post a few of my favorites from the show, but several others that I liked very much were virtually impossible to photograph because of the way they are framed – in particular, what is perhaps my favorite piece in the show, a large print by Carol Summers in rich, deep blues and blacks (at the bottom here I've added an image of the piece, entitled "Stromboli Dark" that I found on a Smithsonian website). 

As noted above, Woodcut: Primary Printmaking runs through October 20 at the Legion of Honor. The Legion of Honor is at 100 34th Avenue (at Clement St.), San Francisco, CA 94121, generally open from 9:30 to 5:15, closed on Mondays.

Art I'm Looking At: Artful Animals at the Legion of Honor (July 17, 2013)

Next to the "Impressionists on the Water" show at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco is a small but engaging exhibit of works on paper depicting animals, drawn from the collection of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts. "Artful Animals, Part 2" (I wasn't aware of Part 1, but apparently there was one) includes a wide variety of works from around 1500 to the present, all taking animals as their subject.

The show is small--occupying a single room--but there is some good work here. I particularly enjoyed Whales Stranded at Ter Hyde (1577), an engraving of beached sperm whales by Flemish artist Johannes Wierix, apparently an account of an actual beaching incident; a hand-colored etching of a hedgehog by Irish artist Peter Mazell (after Peter Pailou) from a 1766 Thomas Pennant publication The British Zoology; and a Barn Owl print by Robert Havell (after Audubon; detail shown here). I didn't exactly understand the relationship between the Havell print and the well known Audubon prints from his The Birds of America (perhaps Havell printed his own edition copying some of the Audubon works?), but a striking image. Also of interest were a number of Japanese prints showing famous kabuki actors of the day depicted as fish or other animals, and I enjoyed seeing Beth Van Hoesen's droopy-eared rabbit, a very familiar image as my father had a reproduction of it, but I had never seen an actual print before. Well worth a quick look. The show runs through October 13.

Art I'm Looking At: Seiko Tachibana at The Ren Brown Collection, Bodega Bay

A new show featuring printmaker Seiko Tachibana opened yesterday at The Ren Brown Collection, 1781 Highway 1, in Bodega Bay (Wednesday through Sunday 10-5). The Ren Brown  Collection, established in 1989, is one of the North Bay's best galleries. It features contemporary Japanese as well as local printmakers and offers work by well known local potters such as John Chambers. The gallery sells Japanese antiques, modern sculpture, and fine jewelry as well. Sophisticated stuff. As Mr. Brown puts it "Just because we're in Bodega Bay doesn't mean we have to sell seagulls on driftwood." The Seiko Tachibana  show continues through October 9, 2011, allowing plenty of time to plan a trip.

Tachibana was born in Japan but has long worked in the Bay Area, having completed a Master of Art Education degree at Kobe University and subsequently earned an MFA at San Francisco Art Institute. Her work is in the Los Angeles County Museum, the Legion of Honor, the Portland Art Museum, and other institutions, as well as in private collections throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. The show that opened yesterday features a recent series of etchings with aquatint called Blue Consonant, but includes paintings and prints from other series, and a small installation made specifically for the gallery space.

What unites these disparate works is a fascination with the circle or sphere. It appears in some form in almost every piece on display--in some work evoking the microscopic world of cells or molecules, in others the opposite extreme, suggesting planetary spheres or an eclipsed Sun. Not surprisingly, Tachibana explains that she is fascinated by all the creative forces of the universe, from the multiplication of single-celled organisms to the process of planet formation. Her work reminds us that the physics of a spherical boundary at the microscopic level is identical to the physics that operates in far-off galaxies as planets coalesce into spheres from dust and gas.

On a technical note, Tachibana is remarkably good at aquatint, a process that uses rosin dust during the etching process to create finely pitted areas of varying density in the printing plate, allowing tonal gradations in a process (etching) that lends itself more naturally to linear expression. Aquatint is difficult to control. Tachibana uses it masterfully and combines it with great skill in manipulating ink on the plate to create effects that mimic watercolor and other wet techniques.

Although Bodega Bay is a bit out of the way for San Francisco art lovers, there's much in the area to justify a journey. Try some of the Bay Area's best clam chowder at Spud Point Crab Co. (1860 Westshore Rd., Bodega Bay; 9-5, closed Wednesdays), have dinner at Terrapin Creek Café (1580 Eastshore Dr., lunch and dinner, Thursday through Sunday), or enjoy a glass of wine at Gourmet Au Bay (913 Coastal Hwy. 1; open every day during the summer 11-7), sitting on the deck overlooking the Bay--an excellent place to taste wine but also a good spot to watch shorebirds on the mud flats--and to watch people. Heading north on Hwy 101, take the Railroad Ave. exit, turn left onto Railroad Ave. and take the 2nd right, onto Stony Point Rd., until Roblar Rd. Go left on Roblar Rd. until you can take a right onto Valley Ford Rd., which is Hwy. 1. Hwy 1 winds west from here to the coast through pretty countryside--or you can do the Google Maps thing. The Ren Brown Collection is on the northern outskirts of the town of Bodega Bay in an attractive house with its own Japanese gardens and teahouse. Don't miss the topiary snail.

Places I'm Visiting: The Annex Galleries, Santa Rosa

During the past month, I've been teaching printmaking at my son's school, the Santa Rosa Charter School for the Arts. We've talked about etching, done relief printing using styrofoam, done the same using found objects, and we've begun to talk about linocuts, which are essentially the same as woodcuts (the process is much the same, that is).

Today we took a short field trip to The Annex Galleries, at 604 College Ave., in Santa Rosa, one of the best print shops in the north Bay Area; few galleries/shops in the vicinity (if any) have the breadth and depth of what's on offer here. The Annex Galleries specializes in modern prints with an emphasis on prints from around the start of the 20th century until around 1970.

The gallery is now doing a show entitled A Century of American Color Block Prints that is well worth seeing. Many blocks are on display along with the prints, and there is a flipbook that shows the successive stages of printing a multi-block print, which adds an extra dimension (bottom photo). Recommended. Free admission. Street parking only. Monday through Saturday, 12PM to 5PM. Through February 27.