Art by Medium: Monotype

Color monotype with collage. Kushner recently completed a series of monotypes, many with collaged decorative papers. He worked from still-lives of flowers, fruits, pitchers and Bett...

The present artwork is a vibrant and colorful example of the woodcut prints of Carol Summers. The image is dominated by the form of a red tropical flower, closely cropped around the petals like in the photographs of Imogen Cunningham and the paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe. The playfulness of the image is enhanced by Summers' signature printmaking technique, which allows the ink from the woodblock to seep through the paper, blurring the edges of each form. 9.63 x 11.63 inches, artwork 21 x 23 inches, frame Edition 16/50 in pencil, lower right Titled in pencil, lower right Signed in pencil, lower center Framed to conservation standards using archival materials including 100 percent rag matting, Museum Glass to inhibit fading, and housed in a modern profile gold gilded wood moulding. Carol Summers (1925-2016) has worked as an artist throughout the second half of the 20th century and into the first years of the next, outliving most of his mid-century modernist peers. Initially trained as a painter, Summers was drawn to color woodcuts around 1950 and it became his specialty thereafter. Over the years he has developed a process and style that is both innovative and readily recognizable. His art is known for it’s large scale, saturated fields of bold color, semi-abstract treatment of landscapes from around the world and a luminescent quality achieved through a printmaking process he invented. In a career that has extended over half a century, Summers has hand-pulled approximately 245 woodcuts in editions that have typically run from 25 to 100 in number. His talent was both inherited and learned. Born in 1925 in Kingston, a small town in upstate New York, Summers was raised in nearby Woodstock with his older sister, Mary. His parents were both artists who had met in art school in St. Louis. During the Great Depression, when Carol was growing up, his father supported the family as a medical illustrator until he could return to painting. His mother was a watercolorist and also quite knowledgeable about the different kinds of papers used for various kinds of painting. Many years later, Summers would paint or print on thinly textured paper originally collected by his mother. From 1948 to 1951, Carol Summers trained in the classical fine and studio arts at Bard College and at the Art Students League of New York. He studied painting with Steven Hirsh and printmaking with Louis Schanker. He admired the shapes and colors favored by early modernists Paul Klee (Sw: 1879-1940) and Matt Phillips (Am: b.1927- ). After graduating, Summers quit working as a part-time carpenter and cabinetmaker (which had supported his schooling and living expenses) to focus fulltime on art. That same year, an early abstract, Bridge No. 1 was selected for a Purchase Prize in a competition sponsored by the Brooklyn Museum. In 1952, his work (Cathedral, Construction and Icarus) was shown the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in an exhibition of American woodcuts. In 1954, Summers received a grant from the Italian government to study for a year in Italy. Woodcuts completed soon after his arrival there were almost all editions of only 8 to 25 prints, small in size, architectural in content and black and white in color. The most well-known are Siennese Landscape and Little Landscape, which depicted the area near where he resided. Summers extended this trip three more years, a decision which would have significant impact on choices of subject matter and color in the coming decade. After returning from Europe, Summers’ images continued to feature historical landmarks and events from Italy as well as from France, Spain and Greece. However, as evidenced in Aetna’s Dream, Worldwind and Arch of Triumph, a new look prevailed. These woodcuts were larger in size and in color. Some incorporated metal leaf in the creation of a collage and Summers even experimented with silkscreening. Editions were now between 20 and 50 prints in number. Most importantly, Summers employed his rubbing technique for the first time in the creation of Fantastic Garden in late 1957. Dark Vision of Xerxes, a benchmark for Summers, was the first woodcut where Summers experimented using mineral spirits as part of his printmaking process. A Fulbright Grant as well as Fellowships from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation followed soon thereafter, as did faculty positions at colleges and universities primarily in New York and Pennsylvania. During this period he married a dancer named Elaine Smithers with whom he had one son, Kyle. Around this same time, along with fellow artist Leonard Baskin, Summers pioneered what is now referred to as the “monumental” woodcut. This term was coined in the early 1960s to denote woodcuts that were dramatically bigger than those previously created in earlier years, ones that were limited in size mostly by the size of small hand-presses. While Baskin chose figurative subject matter, serious in nature and rendered with thick, striated lines, Summers rendered much less somber images preferring to emphasize shape and color; his subject matter approached abstraction but was always firmly rooted in the landscape. In addition to working in this new, larger scale, Summers simultaneously refined a printmaking process which would eventually be called the “Carol Summers Method” or the “ Carol Summers Technique”. Summers produces his woodcuts by hand, usually from one or more blocks of quarter-inch pine, using oil-based printing inks and porous mulberry papers. His woodcuts reveal a sensitivity to wood especially its absorptive qualities and the subtleties of the grain. In several of his woodcuts throughout his career he has used the undulating, grainy patterns of a large wood plank to portray a flowing river or tumbling waterfall. The best examples of this are Dream, done in 1965 and the later Flash Flood Escalante, in 2003. In the majority of his woodcuts, Summers makes the blocks slightly larger than the paper so the image and color will bleed off the edge. Before printing, he centers a dry sheet of paper over the top of the cut wood block or blocks, securing it with giant clips. Then he rolls the ink directly on the front of the sheet of paper and pressing down onto the dry wood block or reassembled group of blocks. Summers is technically very proficient; the inks are thoroughly saturated onto the surface of the paper but they do not run into each other. The precision of the color inking in Constantine’s Dream in 1969 and Rainbow Glacier in 1970 has been referred to in various studio handbooks. Summers refers to his own printing technique as “rubbing”. In traditional woodcut printing, including the Japanese method, the ink is applied directly onto the block. However, by following his own method, Summers has avoided the mirror-reversed image of a conventional print and it has given him the control over the precise amount of ink that he wants on the paper. After the ink is applied to the front of the paper, Summers sprays it with mineral spirits, which act as a thinning agent. The absorptive fibers of the paper draw the thinned ink away from the surface softening the shapes and diffusing and muting the colors. This produces a unique glow that is a hallmark of the Summers printmaking technique. Unlike the works of other color field artists or modernists of the time, this new technique made Summers’ extreme simplification and flat color areas anything but hard-edged or coldly impersonal. By the 1960s, Summers had developed a personal way of coloring and printing and was not afraid of hard work, doing the cutting, inking and pulling himself. In 1964, at the age of 38, Summers’ work was exhibited for a second time at the Museum of Modern Art. This time his work was featured in a one-man show and then as one of MoMA’s two-year traveling exhibitions which toured throughout the United States. In subsequent years, Summers’ works would be exhibited and acquired for the permanent collections of multiple museums throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. Summers’ familiarity with landscapes throughout the world is firsthand. As a navigator-bombardier in the Marines in World War II, he toured the South Pacific and Asia. Following college, travel in Europe and subsequent teaching positions, in 1972, after 47 years on the East Coast, Carol Summers moved permanently to Bonny Doon in the Santa Cruz Mountains in Northern California. There met his second wife, Joan Ward Toth, a textile artist who died in 1998; and it was here his second son, Ethan was born. During the years that followed this relocation, Summers’ choice of subject matter became more diverse although it retained the positive, mostly life-affirming quality that had existed from the beginning. Images now included moons, comets, both sunny and starry skies, hearts and flowers, all of which, in one way or another, remained tied to the landscape. In the 1980s, from his home and studio in the Santa Cruz mountains, Summers continued to work as an artist supplementing his income by conducting classes and workshops at universities in California and Oregon as well as throughout the Mid and Southwest. He also traveled extensively during this period hiking and camping, often for weeks at a time, throughout the western United States and Canada. Throughout the decade it was not unusual for Summers to backpack alone or with a fellow artist into mountains or back country for six weeks or more at a time. Not surprisingly, the artwork created during this period rarely departed from images of the land, sea and sky. Summers rendered these landscapes in a more representational style than before, however he always kept them somewhat abstract by mixing geometric shapes with organic shapes, irregular in outline. Some of his most critically acknowledged work was created during this period including First Rain, 1985 and The Rolling Sea, 1989. Summers received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Bard College in 1979 and was selected by the United States Information Agency to spend a year conducting painting and printmaking workshops at universities throughout India. Since that original sabbatical, he has returned every year, spending four to eight weeks traveling throughout that country. In the 1990s, interspersed with these journeys to India have been additional treks to the back roads and high country areas of Mexico, Central America, Nepal, China and Japan. Travel to these exotic and faraway places had a profound influence on Summers’ art. Subject matter became more worldly and non-western as with From Humla to Dolpo, 1991 or A Former Life of Budha, 1996, for example. Architectural images, such as The Pillars of Hercules, 1990 or The Raja’s Aviary, 1992 became more common. Still life images made a reappearance with Jungle Bouquet in 1997. This was also a period when Summers began using odd-sized paper to further the impact of an image. The 1996 Night, a view of the earth and horizon as it might be seen by an astronaut, is over six feet long and only slightly more than a foot-and-a-half high. From 1999, Revuelta A Vida (Spanish for “Return to Life”) is pie-shaped and covers nearly 18 cubic feet. It was also at this juncture that Summers began to experiment with a somewhat different palette although he retained his love of saturated colors. The 2003 Far Side of Time is a superb example of the new direction taken by this colorist. At the turn of the millennium in 1999, “Carol Summers Woodcuts...

Artist: Kazuhide Yamazaki (Japanese-American, 1951-2023) Title: "Push Pin" *Signed and dated by Yamazaki in pencil lower right Year: 1984 Medium: Original Monotype on unbranded wove ...

"Arroyo" is a woodcut and monotype signed by Carol Summers. The print is a break from the usual bright coloring of Summers' images, though is rendered in his typical style and fields of unmodeled color. A pair of trees stand front and center before an arroyo, a Spanish term for an intermittently dry creek, running out to the ocean. A white sunrise glows in the distance beyond the sea. The playfulness of the image is enhanced by Summers' signature printmaking technique, which allows the ink from the woodblock to seep through the paper, blurring the edges of each form. 14.25 x 14 inches, artwork Numbered from the edition of 120 This print was commissioned by the Madison Print Club, Madison, WI Carol Summers (1925-2016) worked as an artist throughout the second half of the 20th century and into the first years of the next, outliving most of his mid-century modernist peers. Initially trained as a painter, Summers was drawn to color woodcuts around 1950 and it became his specialty thereafter. Over the years he has developed a process and style that is both innovative and readily recognizable. His art is known for its large scale, saturated fields of bold color, semi-abstract treatment of landscapes from around the world, and a luminescent quality achieved through a printmaking process he invented. In a career that has extended over half a century, Summers has hand-pulled approximately 245 woodcuts in editions that have typically run from 25 to 100 in number. His talent was both inherited and learned. Born in 1925 in Kingston, a small town in upstate New York, Summers was raised in nearby Woodstock with his older sister, Mary. His parents were both artists who had met in art school in St. Louis. During the Great Depression, when Carol was growing up, his father supported the family as a medical illustrator until he could return to painting. His mother was a watercolorist and also quite knowledgeable about the different kinds of papers used for various kinds of painting. Many years later, Summers would paint or print on thinly textured paper originally collected by his mother. From 1948 to 1951, Carol Summers trained in the classical fine and studio arts at Bard College and at the Art Students League of New York. He studied painting with Steven Hirsh and printmaking with Louis Schanker. He admired the shapes and colors favored by early modernists Paul Klee (Sw: 1879-1940) and Matt Phillips (Am: b.1927- ). After graduating, Summers quit working as a part-time carpenter and cabinetmaker (which had supported his schooling and living expenses) to focus fulltime on art. That same year, an early abstract, Bridge No. 1 was selected for a Purchase Prize in a competition sponsored by the Brooklyn Museum. In 1952, his work (Cathedral, Construction, and Icarus) was shown for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in an exhibition of American woodcuts. In 1954, Summers received a grant from the Italian government to study for a year in Italy. Woodcuts completed soon after his arrival there were almost all editions of only 8 to 25 prints, small in size, architectural in content, and black and white in color. The most well-known are Siennese Landscape and Little Landscape, which depicted the area near where he resided. Summers extended this trip three more years, a decision that would have a significant impact on choices of subject matter and color in the coming decade. After returning from Europe, Summers’ images continued to feature historical landmarks and events from Italy as well as from France, Spain, and Greece. However, as evidenced in Aetna’s Dream, Worldwind, and Arch of Triumph...

Ashforth is precise in how she studies her subject, researching color and consistency of ink, paint or drawing medium. Her approach is summed up by Christopher Shore, Master Printer ...

Color monotype Since 1985, Woodman has collaborated with Master printer Bud Shark to produce monotypes, woodcuts and lithographs with the same inventiveness and exuberance of her ...

Color monotype based on the edition print of "Travels of Fortune": The artist describes this work as follows: “I wanted to focus on the positive cultural heritage these refugees bri...

Oil Monotype Chine Collé on white BFK Rives Printmaking Paper Hand pulled By Artist on Etching Press 13 x 25 inches framed This piece is featured in Bruckner’s 2024 solo exhibition ...

Oil Monotype Chine Collé on white BFK Rives Printmaking Paper Hand pulled By Artist on Etching Press 13.5 x 21 inches framed This piece is featured in Bruckner’s 2024 solo exhibiti...

In Sanskrit, zero was sunya, emptiness, with its implication of a qualityless layer that exists behind all appearances. Its root, vi, to swell, connotes that is a receptive womb, a p...

Colors have long been known to have psychological and emotional effects, and in the past months, using the calming color blue has been a therapeutic self-treatment. Blue is the color...

"Foot of Mountain," is an abstract expressionist landscape painting on paper. This piece is created with mixed media of paint and fabric to create the impression of a landscape. Lidd...

"Green Glow" is a neon work on paper contemporary abstraction by artist Vivian Liddell. Similar to other works, Liddell uses a subtraction method of removing paint to create the path...

"Star Fuckers," is an abstract expressionist multi media colorful work by Vivian Liddell. In this piece she explores different techniques of adding and subtracting paint to create th...

Monotype print.

Color monotype. In his paintings, drawings and prints, Manuel Ocampo uses inconsistency, contradiction and reversals to explore a colonial heritage. With a singularly perverse view ...

Mixed media composite (acrylics, sumi ink and pencil on mylar, fused with Monotype mounted with white thread stitching) on white BFK Rives Printmaking Paper Paper: 15" x 19" At the...

Mixed media composite (oil, coffee and gouache) on white BFK Rives Printmaking Paper. The circles are hand-cut and shaped to reveal the underside of the paper, as well as the bottom ...

Leaf collagraph with embossing on white BFK Rives Printmaking Paper. Approx. image size: 3" x 3" Paper size: 10" x 8" At the core of the dialogue between the artist and the work ...

INTO THE WILD Size: 29 x 23.5 cm (including frame) Monotype on paper A unique abstract monotype by contemporary British artist Frances Daws, dated 2022 and beautifully presented in ...

Color monotype with collage. Kushner recently completed a series of monotypes, many with collaged decorative papers. He worked from still-lives of flowers, fruits, pitchers and Bett...

Mixed media on paper. Framed: 15" x 18" My work comes from observation, memory and imagination. Collective daydreams that make another world out of this world--the experience of ‘in...

This unique print is 1 of 5 in the series. TumbleWeed 03 is a monotype with mixed media on white BFK Rives printmaking paper and hand pulled by the Artist on the etching press. Thes...

This unique print is 1 of 3 in the series. The Rustling III is a monotype with mixed media on white BFK Rives printmaking paper and hand pulled by the Artist on the etching press. T...

Mind Over Matter is a monotype with mixed media on white BFK Rives printmaking paper and hand pulled by the Artist on the etching press. These small,...

This unique print is 1 of 3 in the series. The Rustling II is a monotype with mixed media on white BFK Rives printmaking paper and hand pulled by the Artist on the etching press. Th...

This unique print is 1 of 3 in the series. Behind Bars No. 3 is a monotype with mixed media on white BFK Rives printmaking paper and hand pulled by the Artist on the etching press. ...

Color monotype with collaged antique paper and gold leaf. Robert Kushner is a painter and a sculptor. He gained attention in the early seventies as a ...

Katherine’s delicate and evocative monotypes portray nature’s flora in all its glory, from the most organic trees and branches to airily etched florals. They are the result of a per...

Color monotype Juarez’s most recent prints are four groups of monoprints Cowboy’s Delight II, Copper Mallow, Yucca Bloom and Flowers and Pearls. Juarez gathered wild flowers from ar...

Monotype on white BFK Rives Printmaking Paper. Could pair with "OrangeBlast(R)" Approx image size: 16" x 16" Paper: 22.5" x 22.5" At the core of the dialogue between the artist and...

Artist: Greg Kessler, American (1966 - ) Title: Women in Heels Year: 1995 Medium: Monotype Etching with Aquatint, signed in pencil Edition: 1/1 Size: 12 x 16 in. (30.48 x 40.64 cm) F...

Katherine’s delicate and evocative monotypes portray nature’s flora in all its glory, from the most organic trees and branches to airily etched florals. They are the result of a perfect (and complicated!) marriage of technical expertise and Katherine’s innate ability to create these light-filled, contemplative pieces. "These works are one of a kind. All are hybrids of different techniques, tied together by being created on an etching press...

An original diptych monotype by American contemporary artist Kathleen Sherin from the artist's Knot Series. Each monoprint is 40" x 30".

Inspired by her close connection to nature, and by what she calls “the spirit of investigation and observation of the natural world,” Suzi Davidoff creates mixed-media drawings and p...

In his monotype, Opus 11, 2008, Keiji Shinohara uses his medium to disrupt the formulation of the landscape genre. A cross-section of sky, or perhaps water, inserts itself into the rich red pigment of the earth. The pale yellow and blue...

Signed, titled and dated verso Monotype on lithographic plate (unique) Created while the artist was at the University of Delaware With distre...

Monotype & collage on paper Federica Frati is an Italian artist born in 1977 who lives lives and works in Brecia, Italy. She is graduated from art school Foppa where she learned the...

Monotype & collage on paper Federica Frati is an Italian artist born in 1977 who lives lives and works in Brecia, Italy. She is graduated from art school Foppa where she learned the...

Monotype on paper Federica Frati is an Italian artist born in 1977 who lives lives and works in Brecia, Italy. She is graduated from art school Foppa where she learned the main arti...

Monotype & collage on paper Federica Frati is an Italian artist born in 1977 who lives lives and works in Brecia, Italy. She is graduated from art school Foppa where she learned the...

Monotype on canvas, collage Federica Frati is an Italian artist born in 1977 who lives lives and works in Brecia, Italy. She is graduated from art school Foppa where she learned the...

From my ongoing series, 'Portable Landscape or Landscape for the Traveler.' Before European contact, the Lenape Manhattan's original inhabitants called the island Manahatta, which me...

Oil based monotype (ie: not multiple) of horse. Expressionist, grays and browns with powerful textures and movement.

The artist has made prints and monotypes at Shark’s since 1981. She has exhibited her work widely and is represented in the collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, The San...

Unique monotype

Unique monotype

Signed and dated in pencil lower right: "Sara Zielinski 2016". A fine impression in fine condition.

Signed and dated in pencil lower right: "Sara Zielinski 2016". A fine impression in fine condition.

Signed and dated in pencil lower right: "Sara Zielinski 2016". A fine impression in fine condition.

Sean Flood, American (b. 1982), Midtown View, circa 2016 Titled in pencil lower center margin: "Midtown View"; signed and dated in pencil lower right margin: "Sean Flood 2016". A fi...

Unique monotype

Colors have long been known to have psychological and emotional effects, and in the past months, using the calming color blue has been a therapeutic self-treatment. Blue is the color...

Unique monotype

Unframed

Color monotype with hand coloring and collage In 2015, Grooms completed a series of colorful monotype collages, a tribute to Henri Matisse. The Matisse Cut Outs...

Randall Exon (b. 1956) was born in Vermillion, South Dakota. Exon earned his B.F.A. in painting from Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas, and an M.F.A. at the University of Iowa. I...

Artist Commentary: This image called, "Flower Scape," is one of my favorite images. It is perfectly seasoned with spring coming right around the corner. The colors are very well exe...

Inspired by her close connection to nature, and by what she calls “the spirit of investigation and observation of the natural world,” Suzi Davidoff creates mixed-media drawings and p...

Unique monotype