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...

Artist: (after) Roy Lichtenstein (American, 1923-1997) Title: "Palm Springs Desert Museum (Still Life with Longhorn Skull and Cactus)" Year: 1982 Medium: Original Offset-Lithograph, ...

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...

"The Meeting of Her Majesty's Stag Hounds on Ascot Heath" is a large colorful mezzotint engraving of an extensive British hunting scene. It was created by Sir Francis Grant...

A late 1960's modern Pop Art etching of horses by Marc Foster Grant (American, b.1947). The galloping horse motif is repeated, in the style of Warhol...

The etching "The Game of Transformation. Butterflies" is an artist's play with meanings and associations. In this work, modern girls are presented in the form of glamorous fluttering...

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...

Patrick Caulfield's cheeky, Pop Art take on a seaside favorite, dressed lobster, abstracted in graphic black strokes atop a field of red decorated with tiny sprigs. Signed by the art...

James Seymour (1702-1752) 'Ironsides' a famous Hunter belonging to the Earl of Halifax Mezzotint by R. Houston Image size 9 1/4 x 13 1/4 in Framed size 12 x 16 in James Seymour was ...

Water Mill (after the drawing by J.M.W. Turner, R.A., 1775-1851). 1885. Mezzotint. Hardie 3.ii. With the publication line. 7 x 10 1/8 (sheet 12 1/4 x 16 5/8...

A sparrow perches at the center of a swath of pale pink, around which wraps hand-written lines from Ron Padgett’s poem “Ode to Clemens Laurrell”: “So I lea...

This Blue Dog work consists of 1 dog with a white background. Up close you can see a major city displayed in the body of the dog. The dog has soulful yellow eyes. This pop art origi...