Like his contemporary, Hiroshi Yoshida, Kawase Hasui was a renowned woodblock print artist of the Shin hanga, or “new prints” movement in early 20th Century Japan.

Also like Yoshida, Hasui traveled extensively and produced images of a variety of locations, though not as much outside of Japan as Yoshida. Instead, Hasui sought out remote landscapes within an increasingly industrialized and populated Japan.

His prints are often of scenes in snow, rain, twilight or darkness, though bright sunlight can also play its part, and he can be wonderfully evocative of different atmospheric and light conditions.

Many of his earliest prints, which are considered by some to be his best work, were lost in an earthquake in 1923. They must have been stunning because those that remain are extraordinarily beautiful.

Since my previous post on Kawase Hsui, some new sources for images have become available on the web. In addition to the web resources listed below, there is a currently in print collection of his work Visions of Japan (Kawase Hasui). You can also find his work in broader collections of Japanese woodblock prints.

The Linosaurus is a fascinating blog devoted to “…the lesser Gods and Goddesses of linoleum and woodblock printing”.

In it, the author, a blogger in the Netherlands (who I identifed as “Gerrie Caspers”, inferred from the URL of the blog and his email address) selects printmakers both old and contemporary, known and unknown, and features their prints as well as paintings and drawings.

He does a fair bit of research on his finds, often in an initial quest to identify the creator of a work he has found (for which he occasionally asks for input from readers) as well as background information on those artists who are known, and references to related artists.

You can search a bit by clicking on labels assigned to various posts to find similar topics, or, as I did, simply browse back through the older posts to see what discoveries await.

(Images above: Edward Pellens, George Soper, Carl Kunst, Jean Jacques Midderigh, unknown, Karl Johne, unknown)

[Via BibliOdyssey]

Early 20th Century painter and printmaker Hiroshi Yoshida is known in his native Japan as a Western style artist, and his work is very much in demand.

Having trained in Western style painting, he carried those influences with him when he moved into traditional Japanese woodblock printmaking, also taking inspiration in subjects from his travels in the U.S. and Europe, as well as India and other parts of the world.

Yoshida is considered one of the foremost proponents of the shin hanga (or “new prints”) style, but combined some of that style’s return to the collaborative printmaking of the ukiyo-e system, in which the artist worked with a carver and block printer, with the personal involvement more common to the sosaku hanga (“creative prints”) style emerging at the time.

His depictions of the Swiss Alps, U.S. national parks and related landmarks, as well as scenes in Japan and elsewhere, resonate with superb drawing and beautifully chosen color.

In addition to returning to favorite themes, like scenes of landscape reflected in water, sailing boats, mountains and clouds, Yoshida often would print the same block in different color schemes, producing dramatically different atmospheric and emotional effects.

(See also my previous post on Hiroshi Yoshida.)

In the mid 19th Century the great Japanese print maker Utagawa Hiroshige (also known as Ando Hiroshige) created his most well known and influential series of prints, titled One Hundred Famous Views of Edo.

These are considered to be among the greatest works in Japanese art.

The Brooklyn Museum, which has a complete set in its collection, has made images of the prints available on its website.

Hiroshige’s views of the city, known as modern day Tokyo, show the city and its environs in the four seasons. You can view them organized that way, browse by keyword, or browse them all in a single page of thumbnails.

The larger images also have a magnifier feature, that you may find useful (better than some, though a larger full image would still be much preferred). The regular images are large enough, however, to be enjoyed on their own.

One of the things that visual art does at its best is allow us to see the world through fresh eyes, reframing the ordinary as extraordinary.

Sometimes, however, the artworks become so iconic and familiar as to need reframing themselves in order to be seen freshly.

M.C. Escher, despite being treated for years by art critics as a piece of gum on their mental shoe, something nasty and annoying that won’t go away, has found his way into the general consciousness and popular culture as a prime example of the unfamiliar made familiar.

Escher was an extraordinary printmaker who slipped between the worlds of art, mathematics and psychology like a psychic eel, finding the distinctions others see as barriers easily porous. He brought back from his introspective journeys evidence of impossible worlds, postcards from inner space; not the fevered dream state imaginings of the Surrealists, but hard edged artifacts of geometric purity.

Through some Klein bottle-like twist of inter-dimensional sleight-of-hand, Escher connected the tenuous vapor of imagination to the rigid solidity of mathematical certainty; in the process giving each a wrenching turn that reveals their hidden sides.

Escher’s reorganizations of space and planes, his defiance of gravity and time and his insistence on showing us the impossible not only as possible but as in-your-face obvious as a brick in your hand, has become the stuff of T-shirts, mugs and desktop wallpapers.

The challenge, as I pointed out in my previous post on M.C. Escher, is to see his artwork as artwork, free from cultural baggage. I think the most promising path for this lies in his less familiar work, delving into the pieces not often reproduced, particularly his early work, and viewing it side by side with his more iconic pieces.

M.C. Escher: Impossible Realities is an exhibition currently at the Akron Art Museum in Ohio that promises to do just that, featuring 130 works, drawn largely from the extensive Escher collection of the Herakleidon Museum in Athens, Greece.

I don’t know if the images above are in the Akron show or not, I just picked a few of my favorites, some iconic, some less so. M.C. Escher: Impossible Realities is on view at the Akron Art Museum until June 5, 2011. The museum’s Facebook page has some photographs of the installation.

For those, like myself, who can’t easily get to Akron, there are numerous books on Escher. One I recommend in particular is The Magic Mirror of M.C. Escher by Bruno Ernst, which not only features some of his early and lesser-known works, but delves into his influences, process and working methods.

I’ve also attempted to collect some web resources below. There is an official M.C. Escher site, maintained by a foundation that Escher himself started. They seem to have submitted to the kind of web image paranoia that makes them reluctant to post images large enough to be really useful in many cases, but their selection may be the most complete.

There is now an Escher Museum in the Hague, called Escher in het Paleis (Escher in the Palace), though their site doesn’t seem to have a gallery of images.

World of Escher, despite its commercial bent, has some larger images. Note that there are more in the drop-down list than are displayed as thumbnails. Art Renewal has good images, if a limited selection. Cuidad de la pintura has a nice selection (note second page).

The National Gallery in Washington has a good selection, as well as a page on his life and work.

The M.C. Escher bio on Wikipedia has a fairly extensive list of linked images, most of which are linked in turn to larger versions.

If you spend some time with Escher, looking at both the familiar and lesser-known works, you may discover that he has more ways than you realized to show you the ordinary as extraordinary.

Tokyo born artist Ray Morimura creates woodblock and linocut prints that manage to feel at once traditional and modern.

His crisp, sharp edges of color delineate forms that often repeat or combine to form patterns, at times varying in size to suggest perspective and distance.

Morimura studied painting at Tokyo Gakugel University. He originally worked in abstraction but, inspired by the prints of Shigeru Hatsuyama and Sumio Kawakami, he took up the study of woodplock prints.

[Via BibliOdyssey, on Twitter @BibliOdyssey]

Though the physical exhibition for which it was created is in the past (having ended in January of 2010), the Museum of Art of the Rhode Island School of Design has maintained online an interactive called The Brilliant Line: Following the Early Modern Engraver 1480-1650.

The interactive features 8 Renaissance and Baroque engravings, drawn from those in the exhibition as examples; and allows you to examine them in more detail, along with some background information on the artist and the work.

Unfortunately the interface for viewing the engravings’ details is poorly implemented, limited to a virtual loupe (with your cursor stuck in the center — hello?).

However, the “Analyze Lines” feature, accessed from a button above the images, is worth visiting. It allows you to interactively view layers of lines that have been extracted from the image and isolated by using a set of sliders that can display the layers in various combinations. It’s a fascinating way to look at how the artists have arranged their outlines, hatching and cross hatching in creating the forms and textures of the engraved image.

They have chosen fine examples of engravings for the feature, including Durer’s Madonna with the Pear (images above, top five).

Also of interest is a video, accessed from the upper right of the interface. Introduced by Emily Peters, Curator of the exhibit, in which Andrew Stein Raferty, Consulting Curator for the exhibit and Associate Professor of Printmaking at RISD, steps through the process of making an engraving, in this case based on a drawing he made after a drawing by Primaticcio (images above, bottom five).

[Via Bibliodyssey, via Bearded Roman]

The Society of Wood Engravers is a U.K. organization devoted, as the name states, to the art of wood engraving.

Though similar in many ways to the more familiar process of woodcuts, of which it is a subset, wood engraving shares similarity to the process of metal engraving in the nature of the tools used.

Wood engraving involves carving in wood, and is, like other woodcuts, a relief printing technique rather than an intaglio process like copper plate engraving, but wood engraving is performed on the end grain of a block of hardwood, rather than the softer side grain.

Engraving tools, like the burin, allow for finer lines and more detail than in traditional woodcut technique, and artists can use this to great effect (wood engraving was one of M.C. Escher’s primary mediums). The Society has a description of the process on their site.

The Society of Wood Engravers has a long history, and in their online gallery is currently showing a selection of prints from their 73rd Annual Exhibition.

The online galleries are slightly awkward to navigate, there are 31 pages of thumbnails accessed by small numbers above the thumbnails, and the larger images are displayed in Lightbox style pop-ups, but perseverance will be rewarded with some wonderful gems.

The physical exhibition will be at the Bankside Gallery in London from 21 January to 2 February 2011.

Wood engraving can have an almost photographic quality, and was used for book illustrations in the 19th Century; it can also have a character somewhat like scratchboard with white lines appearing out of dark areas.

Overall, it is a medium with a variety of styles and approaches and an abundance of visual charm.

(Images above: Cordellia Jones, Stanislav Filipov, Rosamund Fowler, John Bryce, François Maréchal, Geri Waddington, Sarah van Niekerk)

[Via MetaFilter]