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.

In the nineteenth century, new image-making methods like steel engraving and lithography caused a surge in the publication of illustrated books in the United States. Yet even before the widespread use of these technologies, Americans had already established the illustrated book format as central to the nation’s literary culture. In The Portrait and the Book, Megan Walsh argues that colonial-era author portraits, such as Benjamin Franklin’s and Phillis Wheatley’s frontispieces; political portraits that circulated during the debates over the Constitution, such as those of the Founders by Charles Willson Peale; and portraits of beloved fictional characters in the 1790s, such as those of Samuel Richardson’s heroine Pamela, shaped readers’ conceptions of American literature.

Illustrations played a key role in American literary culture despite the fact there was little demand for books by American writers. Indeed, most of the illustrated books bought, sold, and shared by Americans were either imported British works or reprinted versions of those imported editions. As a result, in addition to embellishing books, illustrations provided readers with crucial information about the country’s status as a former colony.

Through an examination of readers’ portrait-collecting habits, writers’ employment of ekphrasis, printers’ efforts to secure American-made illustrations for periodicals, and engravers’ reproductions of British book illustrations, Walsh uncovers in late eighteenth-century America a dynamic but forgotten visual culture that was inextricably tied to the printing industry and to the early US literary imagination.

In the early modern period Europeans were fascinated by the dark colour of African skin. Although this does not show in sixteenth-century prints where skin colour was not usually indicated, this would change in the first decade of the seventeenth century in the wall maps of Willem Jansz. Blaeu. Drawing on developments in printing techniques, changes in artistic fashion, contemporary ideas about scientific illustrations, developments in map making, and the business of book publishing, this article traces the origin of the convention to depict blacks without reference to their skin colour and examines the reasons for its success and demise. It also charts and explains the new model and addresses the different pace in which this convention changed in travel books and wall maps.

This article examines contemporary artistic representations of territoriality and migration. The rise in surveillance of undocumented migrants in the post-9/11 United States produces mechanisms of invisibility and redeploys the border as a movable center of power. I trace this geopolitical shift in territorial representation through the work of Ecuadoran American artist Sandra C. Fernandez, whose print Coming of Age (Transformations) (2008) stages the city of Austin, Texas, as an expanding American metropolis, attracting immigrants in search of work, but insistent on obscuring their presence. Made at the Austin-based workshop Coronado Studio, Coming of Age dialogues with the work of fellow resident artists Ester Hernandez and Tony Ortega, who share an interest in migration and trade liberalization. But in contrast, Fernandez offers a vivid example of the reterritorialization of the nation’s borders, and further connects these notions of territory to historical forms of racial oppression.

The chateau of Fontainebleau, transformed into a magnificent palace during the reign of François I, was the birthplace of many of the greatest artistic innovations of the French Renaissance. The highly wrought, ornate decoration conceived for the interiors by the Italian artists Rosso Fiorentino and Francesco Primaticcio would have a profound effect on the course of French art. The prints that were produced at the palace in the 1540s became one of the main vehicles for the dissemination of this Fontainebleau style throughout France and beyond. Prints at the Court of Fontainebleau, c. 1542-47, to be published in three volumes in Sound & Vision’s Studies in Prints and Printmaking series, examines the etchings, engravings and woodcuts that were executed at the French court in a spurt of activity that lasted approximately five years. Known collectively as the School of Fontainebleau, these prints are particularly intriguing, not least for their lack of identifying inscriptions, their unusual, often amateurish appearance, and the total absence of documentary evidence on the circumstances of their production.