For the benefit of those in other parts of the world, I’ll point out that today is Veterans Day here in the U.S., a day set aside to honor those who have given or risked their lives, endured hardships and put themselves in the service of their country in military service.

The same date, November 11, is also observed in many other countries as Armistice Day or Remembrance Day, a date taken from the signing of the Armistice that ended World War I.

Harold Kerr Eby, usually known as simply Kerr Eby, was an artist who made first hand observations of both World War I and World War II, the former as an artist/soldier, the latter as a civilian member of the combat art program sponsored by Abbott Laboratories (see my posts on They Drew Fire: Combat Artists of World War II and Art of War: Eyewitness U.S. Combat Art From the Revolution through the Twentieth Century).

You can see his impressions of World War I in the form of his dark and emotional etchings, done after the fact but carrying the weight of first hand observation. His World War II images (image above, top) were more direct, often done on the spot with charcoal, pencil and other dry media, with piercing observations of the horror, extremes and physical and emotional fatigue suffered by the soldiers.

Eby was born in Japan, where his father was as a missionary for the Canadian Methodist Church. He studied at Pratt Institute and the Art Students League in New York, at the later studying with George Bellows. He also frequented the Cos Cob artist colony in Connecticut and became friends with Childe Hassam, giving lessons in etching to the senior artist.

He enlisted in the Army and served as ambulance crew during World War I (known at the time as “the war to end all wars” because of its horrible scale; little did they know).

Eby was never officially commissioned to cover the war as an artist, but recorded many of his impressions on his own, later rendered into a series of lithographs that were published as a book.

At the entry of the U.S into World War II he attempted to enlist again, but was over the age limit. Instead he participated in the combat artist reportage program in the Pacific, landing with the Marines at Guadalcanal and Tarawa. He died of a disease contracted while covering the war.

In between the wars, Eby created a a body of work, apparently mostly in the form of etchings and lithographs. If he was a painter to any great extent, I’ve been unable to find any examples.

His etchings, though, are wonderful, with scenes from his trips abroad as well as domestic subjects, and to my eye showing the influence of etchers like James Whistler and Joseph Pennell. The best display of these is on the Old Print Shop site.

There is a long series of Eby’s drawings from WW II on the Navy Art Collection. (The server can be a bit slow, give it time, and note the links to multiple pages at the bottom.)

At times while looking through Eby’s WW II battlefield sketches, I found myself thinking about Gustav Dore’s illustrations for Dante’s Inferno, not from any stylistic similarities, but from the emotional weight of the images.

These are the hardships we’re called on to remember and honor on Veterans Day.

[Suggestion courtesy of Robert Tracy (see my post on Robert Tracy)]

The era around the end of the 19th Century and the beginning of the 20th Century was the high water mark for the art of poster design.

Technological innovations at the time allowed the use of mass-produced zinc plates instead of awkward and expensive lithographic stones to reproduce multiple images, and the artists could take advantage of multiple plates, each printing a different color ink and aligned in close registration, to produce beautifully colored images in quantities that made them suitable for distribution as posters.

This was also a landmark in that it began a social revolution that was at the heart of the Art Nouveau movement to produce egalitarian art, available to the masses and not just the monied elite (see my post on Alphonse Mucha).

Art posters are an almost forgotten art form, and represent a fascinating intersection of drawing, color and graphic design. The artists at the top of this form were those who excelled at all three skills, and the posters themselves are often astonishingly beautiful.

The university library of Lawrence University in Wisconsin, as part of their Digital Image Collections, has assembled an online collection of the Art of the Poster 1880-1918, an amazing treasure trove of beautiful Art Nouveau and other turn of the Twentieth Century posters.

The online collection at Lawrence is (at the moment) composed of 162 images and includes many famous, almost iconic images, including the poster for the first DADA exhibition, the original James Montgomery Flagg Uncle Sam “I Want You” Army recruiting poster, and Mucha’s poster for JOB Cigarette Papers that became famous and widely reproduced in the 1960’s.

There are posters for theatrical performances, expositions, burlesque, art exhibits, champagne, newspapers, magazines, cigarettes, safety matches, shoes, clothing, war bonds, books, cameras, typewriters, electric lamps, bicycles, biscuits and chocolate.

The artists and designers include Jules Cheret, Privat Livemont, Manuel Orazi, Maxfield Parrish, Louis John Rhead, Joseph Pennell, Will Bradley and many others.

But the star here is Alphonse Mucha, who was the master of this form; and is well represented in the collection, including many of the beautiful posters for Sarah Bernhardt that made his reputation as poster artist.

His poster for Princess Hyacinta is a stunning work, that will reward close study.

The library has chosen an image zooming feature with a somewhat awkward implementation, requiring page reloads, and apparently limited to a set grid of enlargement area choices instead of a continuous drag. A small quibble, though, in light of the wonderful collection of images they have prepared and made available online.

Once you select an image from the browsing thumbnails, you can click on an area of the image to enlarge that area, or modify enlargement levels and pan across the image with arrow controls at top left.

Clicking again on the enlarged image will take you in another level of magnification, until you reach 100%, which looks like it may be close to life size in some cases.

Best of all, however, is the easy-to-miss link at the top of the detail pages, just under “Art of the Poster”, for “export image” that allows you to download a full-resolution image (or smaller if you choose). It can take a while, even on a high-bandwidth connection, as the hi-res images are wonderfully large and can be 3 or 4mb in size. (If the display of the downloading image doesn’t appear right away, give it a few seconds.)

Time sink warning: If you like beautiful Art Nouveau posters, and there are some amazing ones in this collection, you could be here for hours, especially if you start downloading high-resolution images.

(Image above, clockwise from left: Alphonse Mucha, Louis John Rhead, Manuel Orazi, Maxfield Parrish)

[Link via Kattulus on MetaFilter]

The Blanton Museum of Art, part of the University of Texas at Austin, is currently showing Exquisite Visions of Japan, which is an exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints from the James A. Michener Collection of the Honolulu Academy of Arts.

Though the online image gallery on the museum’s site is minimal, it provides a nice jumping off point for revisiting some of the extraordinary Japanese woodblock print artists I’ve written about before, including Hiroshi Yoshida, Kawase Hasui, Katsushika Hokusai and Ito Shinsui; as well as looking for links for some artists I have not yet written about, like Utagawa Hiroshige, Hiratsuka Unichi, Okumura Masanobu, Katsukawa Shunsho and Kitagawa Utamaro.

Many of these artists are associated with the genre known as Ukiyo-e, or pictures of the “floating world”. (As I mentioned in my post on a recent exhibit of work from the Utagawa School at the Brooklyn Museum, the “floating world” is not what you might think on first hearing the term.) Others are associated with the “shin hanga” or “new print” movement.

These artists were tremendously influential on European artists in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, particularly the Impressionists and others like Whistler.

Unfortunately, my knowledge of the history and relationship of these artists and their times is frustratingly minimal. You will also have to forgive me if I am inconsistent in the order in which I use the artist’s family and given names, as this varies in listings and the naming conventions are unfamiliar enough that I’m never quite clear about which is which.

I do know that some of these works are among the most beautiful prints I’ve ever encountered. Particular favorites of mine are those of Hiroshi Yoshida and Kawase Hasui.

(Image above: Okumura Masanobu, Utagawa Hiroshige, Hiroshi Yoshida)

[Link via Art Knowledge News]

We tend to think of Japanese prints as depicting serene, contemplative scenes of mountains and gardens; and characterize them as the work of Zen-like removal from the bustle of everyday life.

On hearing that the term Ukiyo-e, the name for one of the most prominent genres of Japanese prints, refers to “pictures of the floating world”, we might assume, as I first did, that the intention is metaphysical.

In fact, the “floating world” is a term derived from a reference to a very much here-and-now (at the time) subculture that revolved around pleasure centers of major cities like Kyoto, Osaka and Edo (now Tokyo), in which food, drink, theatre, sex and other amusements offered their earthly allure.

Many of the prints that belong to that genre were of popular subjects like famous actors, sumo wrestlers, warriors, beautiful courtesans, interiors of theaters and scenes of frivolity and celebration like fireworks displays (image above: Fireworks at Ryogoku Bridge by Utagawa Toyokuni). These prints could be produced in great enough numbers that a wide audience, for whom original paintings were out of reach, could afford them. In effect, they were the visual pop culture of the time.

In fact, the government often cracked down on the artists for pandering to the public with base and popular subjects and tried to forbid the sale of pictures of famous actors, beautiful women and overtly erotic subject matter. It was later, perhaps because of the crackdowns, that many of the same artists moved into landscape for their primary subjects.

The Brooklyn Museum in New York has mounted a show of more than 70 prints, both from the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin, and their own extensive collection of Japanese prints, called Utagawa: Masters of the Japanese Print, 1770-1900 that brings this character of the Ukiyo-e prints into high relief.

The Utagowa School, founded by Utagowa Toyoharu, was the major force in the Japanese print market in the 19th Century. It encompassed many of the of the finest artists working in woodblock prints at the time, including Utagawa Hiroshige (also known as Ando Hiroshige).

The Brooklyn Museum owns a complete set of Hirosage’s famous 100 Views of Edo, one of the most revered series of works in Japanese Art.

Utagawa: Masters of the Japanese Print, 1770-1900 is at the Brooklyn Museum from now through June 15, 2008.

If you happen to travel to brooklyn for the exhibit, don’t miss the fact that the Brooklyn Botanic Garden has a beautiful Japanese Hill and Pond Garden that should be showing signs of first blossoms about now; in which you can walk through the kind of serene and contemplative landscape we normally associate with Japanese prints.

For an experience more in keeping with the popular early prints of the Utagawa School, you might try Times Square.

Addendum: The Brooklyn Botanical Garden is offering a Utagwa woodprinting class inspired by the museum’s exhibit. From the Garden’s description of the class: “The Brooklyn Museum’s exhibit of Utagawa woodblock prints will inspire us to make wood and/or linoleum block prints of BBG sites. Two or three sets of numbered prints will be the class goal. Previous experience with linoleum and/or wood block printing is necessary. To register, call 718-623-7220. 6 Thursdays: May 1 to June 5 | 10:30 a.m.–1:30 p.m. $174 member, $189 nonmember (Fee includes $25 lab fee.)”

Ephemera is defined as printed or written material that isn’t intended to be preserved. Magazines and newspapers, for example, are meant to be transitory, disposed of once read (the pile of National Geographics in your grandfather’s attic notwithstanding.)

Even many books are meant to be ephemeral; computer instruction manuals, for example, are out of date the instant the ink is dry because the next version of whatever it is has jut gone into beta.

Ephemera has a long history (ironically enough), as one person’s transient junk is another’s lasting treasure (witness baseball cards and comic books).

For literally hundreds of years, printed matter has been produced that was quickly made irrelevant by new events. Often this material is accompanied by illustrations, images that are as varied, weird and bizarre as anything intentionally created by fantasy artists.

It used to be that this material was relegated to dusty libraries and second hand book shops, where diligent curiosity seekers would occasionally turn up forgotten gems of oddness and wonder. But everything, it seems, whether ephemeral or significant, is being scanned and put online at some point, as our entire civilization is squeezed through the digital cheesecloth of the internet and filtered into archival bits.

“PK” (or “peacay”) is an individual who has a knack for finding particularly fascinating bits of treasure amid the cultural detritus as it settles into the great Sargasso Sea of internet archives. He collects the most bizarre and interesting pieces of visual ephemera and displays then for our delight on his long running blog, BibliOddysey, which I’ve written about before.

Now, in some kind of poetic circle of weirdness, some of this material has been collected and printed as a book, BibliOdyssey: Amazing Archival Images from the Internet, in which some of the best and strangest of PK’s finds are collected and annotated by PK for our edification, amusement and delighted bewilderment.

The book is part of a nascent publishing venture by the Fuel design group, a well known design firm in the U.K. In his description, PK points out that “With pre-production topping out at somewhere over 500 years, BibliOdyssey might well be the slowest book ever published.”

You can read about the book on the Fuel site, or on the BibliOdyssey site, where you can also, of course, get lost in the online display of ephemera. There’s something special and different, though, about the way images appear in print; and in this case the bits of ephemera are being re-released back into their natural element, at home once again in the sea of printed pages.

Let me see if I’ve got this right now, this is a book about visual material from the web that was archived from books, but I’m telling you about it on the web, and pointing you to online sources from which you could order the book…

In the days long before the convenience of offset printing and the sophisticated inkjet technology of Giclée prints, artists who wanted to create more than one copy of an artwork had to utilize printmaking techniques that were often elaborate and time consuming, though somewhat less so than creating multiple originals.

These days many of these same processes are still used by artists who make works involving multiple copies, both to set them apart from the more commercial process of having images of the work reproduced by photomechanical printing, and because they have a passion for the printmaking process itself, in spite of the work involved.

I suspect that love of the process accounts for a lot in the case of Tokyo based woodblock printer David Bull, who works in the painstaking methods of traditional Japanese woodblock prints.

In addition to his own work as a printmaker, Bull has created an maintains an extensive website at woodblock.com.

The opening page of the site is arranged to allow you to access the multiple facets of the site, involving different projects, as though they were different, independent websites. I found this arrangement a bit confusing, and to me his “front page” makes a better entry point and serves the purpose of a more traditional home page, with introductory material and more thorough navigation.

Those already interested in printmaking, if they aren’t already familiar with the site, will find hours worth of material to get lost in, both about Bull’s own work and technique and more general features, including a “Woodblock RoundTable” (discussions of the process in a blog format), a mini-site devoted to the woodblock prints of John Edgar Platt and a “Handbook of Japanese Printmaking Techniques” to which Bull continues to add material. Though somewhat awkwardly arranged (the intention is to have two windows open, using one for navigation), the Handbook has one of the most thorough descriptions of the process I’ve ever encountered.

Those of us whose appreciation of woodblock printing is more as observers than participants will find some fascinating highlights, notably a slideshow of the process of printing his piece “River in Summer“, which slowly animates through the sequence of impressions, or can be navigated manually with controls the pop from the bottom on mouseover.

Color woodblock printing involves multiple impressions, in which differently carved blocks, each painstakingly cut to leave a certain area in relief to receive ink, are printed over the same sheet of paper in precise alilgnment, each carrying a particular color of ink to areas of the image.

This printmaking process is hundreds of years old and is the fundamental basis of modern printing technology; except that, instead of discreet areas of solid color, images are broken into a series of dots using photographic screens, the arrangement of which, like Seurat’s pointillist paintings, combine in the eye to form larger areas of various colors. Plates are made using (usually) four colors (cyan, magenta, yellow and black), and printed in sequence on the same sheet or roll of paper, creating an image with the illusion of a much wide range of colors. Underlying it all, though, is that same idea of multiple impressions of separate color plates on the same image that is central to color woodblock printing.

It feels like some kind of weirdly poetic circle closing when reading about the continuation of this centuries old method of creating multiple images via the electronic “publishing” system of the net. For some reason, I just love that.

The woodblock.com web site also contains a more detailed step-by-step description the color woodblock process for Bull’s “River in Summer” print (images above left) that goes through the individual impressions (which, to my surprise, begin with a blank impression to prepare the surface of the paper), and shows the print in each of it’s 31 stages (impression #17, above, second image), along with images of the individual impressions printed separately (impression #17 shown alone, above, third image) all the way to the finished piece (image above, bottom).

Bull’s detailed description of the process will give you a deeper appreciation not only of his own work, and color woodblock printing in general, but of the work of some of the wonderful Japanese printmakers I’ve featured in the past on lines and colors, like Katasushika Hokusai, Hiroshi Yoshida, Kawase Hasui and Ito Shinsui.

How cool would it be if we could actually see the whole intricate pattern of the influences of one artist on another that make up the brilliant, if ragged, cloth of art history. The best any one individual can hope for is glimmers and flashes of interconnectedness where the pattern reveals a small portion of itself, a brief hint at how the whole is tied together.

Occasionally we see threads that seem connected behind the surface in some way, an indication of a nexus of influence under the cloth, where parts of the pattern are pulled together and rewoven, an indication that some artists are seen more through their influence on other artists than in the wide recognition of their own work.

The more I investigate the work of engraver and illustrator Jean Ignace Isidore Gèrard, more commonly known by his pen name J.J. Grandville, the more I see his influence on other artists. Though he was tremendously influential on artists in his own time and on generations to follow, his own work and name have undeservedly faded almost into obscurity.

Grandville’s brilliantly imaginative pen and ink style engravings from the early 1800’s were one of the seminal sources of modern cartooning, comics and fantastic illustration, as well as numerous styles of fantastic art.

If you’re familiar with the Dadaists and Surrealists, who were quick to extol the virtues of artists they saw as precursors of Surrealism, it’s easy to see how Grandville’s fantastical drawings of griffin-like animal mash-ups, which he called “metamorphoses” and to which he devoted an entire book titled Les Animaux (The Animals), would be enough to put him high on their list; but his fantastic visions of anthropomorphic plants, audiences of opera goers whose heads have been replaced with single eyes, fancies of drawing instruments come alive, mechanical musicians and people with overlarge or tiny heads and otherwise distorted figures made him a shoo-in for the Surrealist hall of predecessors.

Max Ernst, in particular, demonstrates tremendous influence by Grandville in his Surrealist collage-novel (or graphic novel, if you will) Un Semaine du Bonté (A Week of Kindness).

The next thing I discovered about Grandville’s influence on other artists is how dramatically his work informed Sir John Tenniel’s wonderful and definitive illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Not only was Grandville’s style, treatment and subject matter inspirational to Tenniel in his interpretations of the Alice stories (to the point where Tenniel might be accused of “borrowing” some elements of Grandville’s drawings), I later realized that Grandville’s animal “metamorphoses”, his bizarre characters, anthropomorphic insects, plants and animals, and his visions of fantastic scenes like his tableau of playing cards come to life, were direct inspiration for Charles (”Lewis Carroll”) Dodson himself in writing the stories.

Grandville entertained us with dancing teapots and cavorting flowers a century and a half ahead of Disney. His city dwellers wiith distorted body shapes, often with heads disproportionate to the body, or with exaggeratedly tall and thin juxtaposed with squat and short, showed up both in Mutt n’ Jeff in the early 20th Century and Yellow Submarine in the 1960’s and his steam-powered musicians presaged steampunk by two centuries.

Thomas Nast and the generations of political cartoonists that were to follow, owe more than a nod to Grandville (along with Hogarth and many others). All modern cartoons involving social commentary can trace a thread back to Grandville, and the influence is certainly evident in the underground comix artists of the 1960’s, undoubtedly through the availability of a wonderful Dover book that I’ll recommend to you at the end of the article.

You can certainly see Grandville in the marvelously imaginative and wonderfully drawn fantasies of Heinrich Kley, the sketches of Jan Faust, the fantastic etchings of M.C. Escher and many others.

Some of Grandville’s illustrations can seem tame and ordinary, depending on the phases of his career, but many are wonderful flights of fancy.

Wild-eyed demons in top hats invite angels to dance, celestial garden keepers water both flowers and pedestrians with umbrellas, anthropomorphic lightning rods prepare one another to catch bolts, stage hands raise the curtains of night and use a gas lamp igniter to light the morning sun, an eclipse is revealed to be the result of a passionate embrace of the sun and moon, watched voyeuristically by astrolabes and other celestial mapping instruments, characters ares shown walking across celestial bridges or juggling planets.

Some of his drawings were playful explorations of perspective, many are fantasies of anthropromorphicised drawing instruments, and in fact mechanical devices in general; Grandville was active when the industrial revolution was just getting up steam (sorry, couldn’t resist).

Some are simply incomprehensibly bizarre, others are marvelous images that I can’t fathom the origin of, like the one in which dice, dominos, war medals and Egyptian obelisks grow like rock crystals.

Many of these drawings would be even more powerful if we understood the social context in which they were presented and the follies of which they were meant to satirize. He was engaged in social commentary, and was in that respect essentially a cartoonist, though his drawings are realized with a wonderfully controlled, richly detailed but clearly stated pen and ink like engraving style that would be worth study by anyone interested in creating prints or applying ink to paper (or drawing with the digital equivalent).

Fortunately, Grandville’s terrific drawings are available to modern audiences in several books, most notably an excellent and inexpensive Dover book, out of print but available used, Fantastic Illustrations of Grandville (Dover Pictorial Archives), which I believe is a repackaging of an earlier Dover book, Bizarreries and Fantasies of Grandville, my copy of which is dog-eared with years of delighted use. It collects his two most influential works, Les Animaux, and Un Autre Monde (Another World), which was a story loosely woven to tie together many of his existing illustrations so they could be issued as a book.

The best online source I’ve found for Grandville is on Visipix. Once you get past a pop-up ad and some other annoyances, there is a thumbnail gallery and click-through for 179 of Grandville’s drawings, many of the from scans of his two most famous books, the editions of which, apparently, had hand-applied color on some plates. While clicking through the drawings with the convenient “Next, Previous, Thumbnails” style navigation, you can choose at any time to view them in one of several resolutions, allowing you to breeze through them and then view your favorites in glorious detail. Wonderful!

It’s interesting to note, as this article in Time Magazine points out, that Grandville’s influence extends to the fact that, even though he has been dead since 1847, he has been, along with David Levine, one of the two major illustrators for The New York Review of Books in the 20th Century.

Ito Shinsui was a Japanese printmaker who, like his contemporaries Hiroshi Yoshida and Kawase Hasui, was part of the Shin Hanga movement in the early 20th Century. (In writing these artist’s names, I’m using the Western convention of putting the given name first.)

Shin Hanga was essentially a revival of the art of Ukiyo-e woodblock prints from the previous century (see my post on Hokusai), often combined with influences from Western art. Interestingly, one of the major European influences on the Shin Hanga artists was that of the French Impressionists, who, in turn, had been dramatically influenced but the brilliant colors and subtle compositions of Ukiyo-e prints.

Unlike Yoshida and Hausi, who, in keeping with the majority of the Shin Hanga artists, concentrated on landscape and scenes of life in towns and cities, Shinsui focused on the depiction of people, in particular beautiful young women.

His elegant compositions, in which the negative space is as vital as the primary shapes, are often 3/4 length figures with minimal space around them in the the frame. His beautifully dressed subjects, their decorative robes flowing about them in graceful waves, are frequently engaged in the application of makeup or preparation for the bath, and are warm with an understated eroticism. His forms are delicately modeled, with fine lines delineating areas enlivened with rich but subtle color.

You can see some of the influence of European art in certain prints (in his later years, you can even see the influence of cubism), and the strong traditions of Ukiyo-e in others. Though his depictions of women are his most notable subjects, Shinsui also created beautiful, brilliantly colored landscapes, which are not to be missed. He was at one point awarded the status of “intangible living treasure” by the Japanese government.

Some artists are drawn to nature’s raw and wild beauty, some to fantasies of other times or imagined worlds, but few follow Joseph Pennell’s fascination with the urban and industrial landscape of his time. He was more interested in a riverbank flanked by factories throwing columns of smoke into the air than one in pristine nature lined with willow trees.

Pennell was an american artist and writer. He was most renowned for his etchings. Born in Philadelphia, he studied here at the Pennsylvania School of Industrial Art and later at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; but, like his friend James McNeill Whistler, he was soon drawn to Europe. Pennell lived there from 1883 to 1917, when he moved back to the U.S. and settled in New York.

Pennell’s etching style is dramatically influenced by Whistler, which is a Good Thing, as Whistler, at least in my humble opinion, is probably the second greatest etcher in Western art, behind only Rembrandt. Pennell’s lines seem softer than Whistler’s, but both had an amazing ability to project mood, surface, light and atmosphere with their etched lines.

In Europe he drew the streets, buildings and factories of London and other European cities (image above, top), and, on his return to the U.S. did a remarkable series of etchings of New York city. Many artists might be overwhelmed by the visual complexity of the early 20th Century New York cityscape, with its beautiful buildings textured with ornate cornices, elaborate window ledges and hundreds of windows.

Pennell had a remarkable eye, matched by surety of hand, for reducing that complexity to a simple visual language that still retained the feeling of the complex within his deceptively simple rendering (image above, lower left).

There is a nice inexpensive Dover book of his remarkably evocative simplifications of the complexity of New York skyscrapers and city streets, Pennell’s New York Etchings: 90 Prints, and a less common book of Joseph Pennell’s pictures of Philadelphia, as well as books of his etchings of London, New Orleans and the the Panama Canal. (Unfortunately, many of the books linked here are out of print, but you may be able to find them with a little digging.)

This was at a time when photography was in its infancy and people could only see other parts of the world through the eyes of artists like Pennell.

Pennell is also the author of several books on illustration and pen drawing, particularly one I’m fortunate to have a copy of, Pen Drawings and Pen Draughtsmen. Their Work and Their Methods. If you can’t find a copy to buy, look for it in libraries.

Pennell was also an illustrator, perhaps most famous in that role for his World War II poster for war bonds (image above, lower right), which showed New York city under attack, and the Statue of Liberty engulfed in flames and smoke. [ Erratum: mark Morris has written to let me know that the poster was for World War I, not WW II. See this post's comments. ]

One of the best sources I’ve found form Pennell images on the web is the site for the Philadelphia Print Shop, from which you can buy original Pennell etchings.

The “About Me” section of Dan McCarthy’s web site simply has three photos of him pulling screen prints, a photo of a dog (presumably his), and the unhelpful legend, “more soonish..”.

Not very informative, but the prints are pretty much the story. Though there are sections of posters, paintings and even T-shirts on the site, they all seem to carry the flavor of his prints.

The prints themselves are very graphic, beautifully designed and often carry themes of trees against the night sky and, a subject I’m always keen on, dinosaurs, particularly as portrayed in the form of their skeletal remains. The one above, for example, is a 4 color screen print on 100lb Stonehenge printmaking paper (a wonderfully textured paper that I like as a drawing paper for chalk and conté). Oddly, McCarthy doesn’t indicate the size of the edition on the pages that describe the individual prints, but some of them are listed a sold out, so I presume the runs are reasonable numbers (I don’t know the limits of current screen printing materials).

Check out this fascinating print (unfortunately sold out) that is essentially a short graphic story, the biography of a carbon atom.

His posters share some of the same themes, notably skeletal winter trees and skeletal paleo images. Even his paintings are very graphic and share the same thematic direction.

His drawings are a bit different, but I’m particularly fond of them. They remind me very much of drawings I used to make when I was younger, of telephone wires, poles and transformers. (I was just fascinated with the idea of lines drawn across the sky.) Mine were just sketches, though. McCarthy’s are more fully realized silhouette drawings, carefully composed and strongly designed.

McCarthy’s “news” page does seem to have a recent update, and lists newly added prints, so maybe the “more soonish..” promise will be realized with more images and a bit of background about this fascinating artist. Until then we’ll have to extrapolate, like paleontologists, from the bones we can find.

Link via Paleoblog and Drawn!