Karl Wirsum Art

Bright orange leaps up like flames, or swaying grass, over which hovers a large-eyed bee sketched in black and orange. Over the fire-red in neat handwriting Ron Padgett...

Walasse Ting 丁雄泉 Green Cat, 1984 Color etching and aquatint on copper plate, printed on Fabriano Rosaspina paper Pencil signed, numbered 178/230, dated 1984 along with artist's perso...

This Blue Dog work consists of 4 frames, 1 each blue, pink, fuchsia and green. Each frame contains the head of a blue dog all with soulful yellow eyes. This pop art animal original...

This Blue Dog work consists of a single blue bear with a red nose on a black background. The bear has soulful yellow eyes. This pop art animal original silkscreen print on paper is ...

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...

This Blue Dog work consists of 2 dogs and a pink antique automobile. One dog is in the foreground and the other is beside the car. Both dogs have ...

James Seymour (1702-1752) A Standing Leap at a Gate Mezzotint with hand colouring Image size 10 x 14 in Framed size 16 1/2 x 20 in James Seymour was an English artist renowned for h...

Artist: Mario Avati, French (1921 - 2009) Title: Elephant Equilibriste Year: 1969 Medium: Mezzotint, signed and numbered in pencil Edition: 35/50 Image Size: 17.5 x 24 inches Size: 2...

"Mizuhiki" is an exclusive publication by Stone + Press in an edition of 100. Katsunori Hamanishi was born in 1949 on Hokkaido island - Japan's second largest island. In 1973 he fi...

Fernando Aceves Humana (Mexico, 1969) 'Lo que nos trajeron', 2007 mezzotint on paper 17.4 x 13.8 in. (44 x 35 cm.) Edition of 20 ID: ACE-101 Unframed

Poster Size: 23.5 x 16.5 in. Vintage Gold Leaf Frame Size: 23.5 x 16.5 in. Signed and inscribed in gold marker, bottom right A poster for "The Winter Ball 1988" in Houston, Texas, p...

"Final Spring" is an original color lithograph by Michael Knigin. The artist signed and titled in the lower center of image. This piece is an artist's proof and features a brightly c...