Aldrecht Durer

Aldrecht Durer lived from 21 May 1471 – 6 April 1528 and he was a German painter, engraver, printmaker and mathematician.  He was referred as the “Father of printing”.  In this review I will be looking at one of his printing works, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1498). This piece of work is a part of a series of 15 woodcuts that Durer created and was published in 1498 for The Book of Revelation in the Bible.  

When I first looked at some of his works which were paintings, I thought I wasn’t going to say anything positive about his work because I don’t really like art from that period but then I had a look at his prints and quite liked them.

I picked this woodcut print as below which is the earliest form of relief printing. When I first looked at the print it appeared to look like a drawing but it’s not. I find the colour in it a bit dull but I like the details and the fine lines in it and I think that these fine lines look very hard to do. I have done lino printing, which is like woodcut, and I found it to be very hard to get fine lines.  I researched some information on how he has done these and he would draw the design directly onto the woodblock itself, or glue a paper drawing to the block, but from my research I found out that he would get a specialist craftsman to cut the wood blocks.

Tom Davidson

Tom Davidson is a local artist. When I went to research him I couldn’t get a lot of information on him just a website of which I presume is his. When I had a look at his website I was quite impressed with a lot of his work. Some of his prints look like photographs when you first see them.

On his website it tells you how he does his work:  “Tom Davidson’s lino-cuts are produced from a single block of linoleum, using a reduction process, printing each colour on top of the previous colour, working from light to dark. All of Tom’s works are hand drawn, or cut and printed by the artist. His prints are produced in limited editions of between twenty and thirty”.

Due to image copyright I cannot insert any of his print works, however one example I would pick would be the one image that is titled An Audience With…. I like this image because I like the way he’s used green to create light.  Another example of a print that I like and think that it looks like a photograph is titled Forth Bridges.  Also I like the subject that he has used which are landscapes and nature.

John Bellany

John Bellany  (1942-2013) was a Scottish painter. Here I am going to look at some of his prints.  When I was doing the research on the work that he has done there weren’t a lot of prints but there were a lot of paintings.  I think he was probably better known as a painter rather than a printmaker.

I had a look at his prints and I can’t say I find them attractive.  I came across a lot of etches and I have chosen this one titled ‘Only Time Will Tell’. I noticed that the lines are well defined and the overall image is very dark.  When I looked at other pieces of his work they didn’t have this darkness. I presume that he hasn’t rubbed off all the ink on the plate and that he may have done this on purpose to give an effect of darkness which I like very much.

I find it hard to figure out exactly what he has etched.  Looks like a man’s head with a bird’s large beak and the upper body looks like a snake.  I researched about this and I found out that when he did this piece of work he was going through a bad time in his life.  This came about due to his second wife’s battle with depression and John Bellany turned to drink.