In words and images, an exploration of the British artist whose etchings of European cathedrals and other scenes of church, college, and community have graced parlor walls in America and overseas for over a century. The website is updated and corrected regularly with additional and newly discovered information.

Peter Paul Rubens and the Counter-Reformation crisis of the Beati Moderni (Routledge, 2017), takes up the question of the issues of the implication of imprinted and imprinting images and objects—including engravings, drawings, paintings, sculptures, deathmasks, and wax seals—in the formation of recent saints—or 'Beati moderni' (modern Blesseds) as they were called—in the new environment of increased strictures and censorship that developed after the Council of Trent with respect to legal canonization procedures and cultic devotion to the saints. A particular focus on how the new regulations pertained to the creation of emerging cults of those not yet canonized, including Filippo Neri, founder of the Oratorians. Centrally involved in the book is a revisionist account of the fate and meaning of altarpiece paintings infamously commissioned and then rejected by the Roman Oratorians from Rubens. The book offers the first comparative study of Jesuit and Oratorian imprints of their respective would-be saints, and the controversy they ignited across Church hierarchies.

The present paper discusses woodcuts representing King Sigismund I of Poland against contemporary views on literary and picture portraits. Following classical sources, the local men of letters appreciated the depiction of moral qualities in such works more than a physical likeness. Thus literary descriptions were usually believed to outdo painted or printed pictures, but a few authors admitted that a deft visual artist could render the virtues of the sitter adequately. Consequently, royal woodcuts were usually accompanied by a few verses of text which made up for their shortcomings. Two such works, so far unknown in the literature, have been introduced here to art historical studies and several others have been interpreted anew.

Diego Rivera’s mural 'Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central' is a fascinating critique of high society and wealthy elites. It also offers a multitude of other stories that intersect in a web of historical memory. The massive mural, the histories it depicts, and even its physical journey after a devastating earthquake, hold answers to many of the questions readers might ask about Mexico. It also demonstrates how cultural artifacts explain the world around us and expose intersections and entanglements of specific power dynamics.

Modern Mexican Culture offers an enriching and deep investigation of key ideas and events in Mexico through an examination of art and history. Experts in Mexican cultural and literary studies cover the 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre, the figure of the charro (cowboy), the construct of the postrevolutionary teacher, the class-correlated construct of gente decente, a borderlands response to the rhetoric of dominance, and the “democratic transition” in late twentieth-century Mexico. Each essay is a rich reading experience, providing teachers and students alike with a deep and well-contextualized sense of Mexican life, culture, and politics.

Each chapter provides a historical grounding of its topic, followed by a multifaceted analysis through various artistic representations that provide a more complex view of Mexico. Chapters are accompanied by lists of readily available murals, political cartoons, plays, pamphlets, posters, films, poems, novels, and other cultural products. Modern Mexican Culture demonstrates the power of art and artists to question, explain, and influence the world around us.

I had the pleasure of spending a month working at Mokuhankan Studio in Asakusa, Tokyo from May to June, 2017. One of many new experiences for me was, under the direction of Natsuki Suga (who worked under Kenichi Kubota at the Adachi Institute for 5 years) to make relatively large batches of color using wood board mortars and pestles. This is to assure the pigments’ quality and to create a well-mixed supply of color paste that is ready to use later. Each color requires it’s own sanded cherry board and pestle (pine with cherry faced using epoxy glue) that was made by Lee-san.

Teaching woodblock printmaking to today’s university students is both challenging . . . and surprisingly easy. On the one hand, the student is already immersed in the digital word of handheld devices. On the other hand, students also desire a physical connection and means of expression using other handheld devices, namely barens and chisels.

The secret in our success is to integrate the following strategies within the curriculum: (1) I connect students’ keen interest in Japanese culture and traditions; (2) I train students to use software (primarily Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator); (3) I require students to concentrate on manual dexterity and craftsmanship through carving exercises building on simple skills; and (4) I expect students to print their own color charts which allows for a direct understanding of the printing process.

I will supply the conference participants with lesson plans, examples of student projects, test blocks, and digital process strategies for teaching traditional Japanese style woodblock printmaking within a long-term context

The Bizzarie di Varie Figure is a little known, enigmatic album of etchings that display countless performative bodies, transformed and reimagined to resist definitions and escape categorisations. Human, mechanical, even abstract forms and forces intersect, startling the viewer and opening infinite possibilities of interpretation. These images manipulate their own medium to produce new, unprecedented notions of movement and animation on the printed page, challenging, in this process, traditional concepts of imagination and representation. The first section of this article aims to provide a framework through which the Bizzarie album can be understood not only as a site of experimentation on the production of figures and forms, but also as one where performativity and animation encounter notions of knowledge of nature and production of meaning. The subsequent section focuses on an individual image from the album, an etching depicting the biblical figures of Adam and Eve in the form of trees. In this print, the article argues, the interconnection of nature and humanity complicates early modern ideas on human reproduction, and echoes the potential for infinite generation and creativity in image making.

Computational analysis of the potential historical professional networks inferred from surviving print impressions offers novel insight into the evolution of early modern artistic printmaking in Europe. This analysis traces a longue durée print production history that examines the changing ways in which different regional printmaking communities interacted between 1550 and 1750, highlighting the powerful impact of demographic forces and calling in to question narratives based on single key individuals or the emergence of specific national schools.

The short film, From a Sheet of Paper to the Sky, grew out of research that conducted for an essay of the same title, written for the catalogue accompanying the Paul Nash exhibition at Tate Britain (October 2016 to March 2017). In that essay, Fraser argued against the traditional art historical tendency to review an artist’s work in different media separately, and instead proposed that a consideration of Paul Nash’s painting alongside his three-dimensional and textile designs, his printmaking, and photography, resulted in a fuller understanding of both the conceptual underpinnings and the recurring visual motifs in Nash’s work.

Also see related article, Inga Fraser, "“From a Sheet of Paper to the Sky”", British Art Studies, Issue 7, https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-07/ifraser

View the video using the 'External Link' below.

James Cook’s expeditions to the Pacific were unprecedented in late eighteenth-century Britain, and in the years following the expeditions, extraordinary images of the region were presented to the public. The drawings and paintings made by the artists during the expeditions became the basis for dozens of artworks, which brought to life areas of the world that had previously been little known to Europeans. While these were available to a limited public, tens of thousands of British consumers encountered images of the Pacific through magazine illustrations that were subsequently based on those art works. Published in several leading British magazines in the 1770s and 1780s, these illustrations circulated widely and reached people across Britain and in the American colonies, integrating the Pacific into consumer culture in a way that no other product could. They constituted a rich discourse about the Pacific which was informed by the written accounts and ambitious post-voyage art works, but ultimately separated from them: they were a unique set of representations, the production of which was determined above all by the magazine industry. The magazines presented their readers with the most exotic and spectacular glimpses of the Pacific that they could possibly offer, and they achieved this primarily through a focus on indigenous peoples’ bodies and dress; accuracy, context, and nuance were often diminished as images were adapted and edited for magazine production. Ultimately, these engravings played a critical role in the construction of the idea of the Pacific, at a time when British colonial activity in that region was just beginning.