Dry point. |
Title: Hanging in the Night.
Medium: Dry Point. Size: 17.5cm X 12.5 cm Date: October, 2015 Exhibition Text. The title of this piece is "Hanging in the Night" because I wanted to keep the theme of spiders and creepy. So instead of having another spider web with a huge spider I decided to do an old creepy tree under the light of a crescent moon with little spiders hanging off of it. I made the connection to German Expressionism and the artist Kathe Kollwitz mainly because of the style she used which was texture and the way her lines would flow throughout her pieces. This piece was certainly a challenge for me because I wasn't good at carving away where my lines need to be and most of the small details have vanished because of the wrongful carving. I was very critical about detail and the connection to my block print. |
planning Sketches.Inspiration. Käthe Kollwitz was one of Germany’s most important early 20th-century artists. She captured the hardships suffered by the working class in drawings, paintings, and prints. Themes of war and poverty dominate Kollwitz’s oeuvre, with images of women grieving dead children a particularly important and recurring theme, an experience that Kollwitz suffered herself when her son died. In 1936, the Nazis declared Kollwitz’s art “degenerate” and her artworks were removed from museums. I chose to do use this artist because in some of pieces I get a since of creepiness and sadness which I wanted include in my piece because I carry the theme of spiders and creepiness from my block print.
In comparison to my work, I chose to have my tree and spiders very dark so people could get the creepiness feeling. I also decided to do a tree because everyone says when they see something alone they automatically call it sad, so I only did one tree for that reason. I chose to look at her self- portrait because I had a variation of lines in my piece and her self-portrait includes many different lines. In contrast to my work, I had a different theme as in picture from mine which could cause confusion because I use more characteristics from self-portrait than I do from her other pieces. My background is white even though in her self-portrait it is black but I felt the theme of my piece would pop more and also I used a different technique then what she had used. |
Process and outcome. The process to creating a dry point was somewhat easy. I already had some background with ink printing from my internship at the Milwaukee Art Museum but we didn't actually use the dry point method. Craving the plastic sheet was also hard because the material and tools used were more harder to use but it was very understandable about how each tool worked, whether it was different line thickness or to create texture.
I believe my piece could have had more detail and creativity but in a way I wanted to keep it simple so it would be easier to crave. Some observations I encountered would have to be how the amount of ink affects the print. Something I wish I would have looked more into would be how to create a more creepier tree and to incorporate more texture like crosshatching into the small spiders and the tree. Some of the challenges I endured was my lines becoming off or not following through properly which left out some detail but its not noticeable right away. |