Blackboard Still-life Prints

Leonard Merchant's mezzotint, "Snail in Cup" is inscribed for fellow artist, Fritz Eichenberg. While a student at the Central School for Arts and Crafts in London, a young Leonard Marchant found an engraving rocker in a cupboard and proceeded to turn himself into a master of the painstaking art of mezzotinting. Marchant, who has died in Shrewsbury aged 70, grew up in Simonstown, the Royal Navy's enclave in South Africa. Though his first job was as a parliamentary messenger, he taught himself to paint and, aged 19, was given a one-man show in Cape Town. Fired by this success, he left for England to study painting and, he claimed, to escape the stifling home atmosphere created by his Catholic mother and aunts. (His father was killed in the second world war.) Without contacts in London, he phoned Jacob Epstein, whose recommendation resulted in a grant to study briefly at the Central School. It was later, when studying full-time at the Central, that he saw the mezzotints of the Japanese master, Yozo Hamaguchi, in a London gallery. He was hooked. Creating a mezzotint is tedious in the extreme. The copper plate must first be prepared with a "rocker" which roughens the surface. A plate may be "rocked" 30 or 40 times. The rough texture is then reduced with a burnisher and a scraper, allowing the print a range of tones from velvety black through the greys to white. Marchant's plates could be months in the making. But the technical demands were the least of his worries. In its 18th- and 19th-century heyday, mezzotint was solely a reproductive medium, for copying masters such as Reynolds and Turner. The development of photography rendered it unfashionable, and by the 1960s the technique, known as la manière anglaise, was a bygone medium. Marchant, by now a teacher in printmaking at the Central, began to create original mezzotints with a colleague, Radavan Kraguly. A perfectionist, he seemed to revel in the straitjacket procedure. Perhaps it was the metaphor of bringing darkness out of light that appealed to this straight-talking, sometimes sombre, man, who would suddenly relax and light up like a gleaming hue on one of his prints. His work was of squares and triangles with the occasional cat, black and ominous, and carefully arranged still lifes, featuring plants, a seed pod, a pot he might have bought at auction to celebrate the sale of a print. There were one-man shows, notably at the Bankside Gallery. He sold well at the Royal Academy summer exhibition, was a Florence Biennale prizewinner, spent a fellowship year at the British School in Rome, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers. But making mezzotints was not a paying job. Marchant and his South African wife...

Original poster designed by Pierre Mendell (1929 – 2008) & Klaus Oberer (*1937) promoting an exhibition 1988 at Die Neue Sammlung in Munich on "Italian ...

Andrew Scott, Firework, 2024 Giclée on 310 gsm Etching Rag Paper with hand burnt mount board 45 x 33 cm (17 7/10 × 13 in) Edition 227 of 250 Framed in open-grain black wood Signed a...

Screen print in colors on lightweight board folded into a three-dimensional pyramid. Hand signed and numbered on interior edge by Roy Lichtenstein Numbered 41/300 (only approximate...

Screen print on paper realized by Leo Guida in 1970s. Signed in the plate. Not numbered. Excellent condition.

This artwork titled "Light and Two Branches" c.2010 is an offset lithograph on paper by Japanese artist Kaoru Mansour, b.1956. It is hand signed and numbe...

Screen print on paper realized by Leo Guida in 1970s. Signed in the plate. Not numbered. Excellent condition.

Tomoe Yokoi, Japanese (1942 - ) - Still Life with Rolling Pin, Year: circa 1977, Medium: Mezzotint, signed and numbered in pencil, Edition: 71/150, Image Size: 11.75 x 13.5 inche...

Artist: Beth Van Hoesen – American (1926- 2010) Title: Fresno Basket Date: 1974 Medium: Color aquatint and etching, hand colored with watercolor Image Size: 12.25 x 12.75 inches Fram...

This etching is a study in light and shadow of Taos pueblo pots (Georgia O'Keefe's Adobe staircase) by Santa Cruz, California artist Pam Ackerman (American,...

Still Life is a artwork realized in 1976 by the Italian Contemporary artist Leo Guida (1992 - 2017). Original screen print on cardboard, in an attractive portfolio. Signed on pl...

Flower bouquet design. Sealed on the back with the design studio name and number 484 We offer a small number of these original illustration designs by this design studio based in Al...