Need to cool off?

Shiba (No) Zojo-ji, color woodblock print by Kawase Hasui.

On Met Museum. Use Fullscreen link and download arrow.

Miguel de Cervantes – Don Qixote, plate 1: A world of disorderly notions, picked out of his books, crowded into his imagination by Gustave Doré.

On Wikimedia Commons. Note: the high-resolution file linked from the preview image is genuinely high-resolution: 30mb! Detail crops above are at about one quarter full resolution.

I love the tiny knights jousting on mice in front of his feet.

18th Century Venetian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi was famous for his set of etchings titled Carceri (“Prisons”), sometimes referred to as “Carceri d’invenzione“, or “Imaginary Prisons”.

These were architectural fantasies that were more in keeping with grand imaginative stage sets than any real prisons, filled with arches, bridges, sculpture and elaborate stonework.

Artist Grégoire Dupond, working with Factum Arte in Madrid, has taken images from Piranesi’s etchings and projection mapped them to 3-D CGI models and created an animation of the camera moving through the environments, giving you a moving tour through Piranesi’s fantastical srtructures.

Dupond has recreated 6 of Piranesi’s architectural spaces, including the most iconic of them. As the film moves through them Dupond includes clouds of mist or steam as well as projections of Piranesi’s sketchy figures, which take on a ghost like character in the adaptation.

There is an article on the project on the Factum Arte site.

The still screen captures I’ve shown above don’t begin to convey the feeling of moving through these images.

Piranesi Carceri d’invenzione can be viewed on Vimeo.

For more see my previous posts on Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Piranesi’s Prisons: Architecture of Mystery and Imagination.

[Via adamvasaco on MetaFilter]

The wonderfully idiosyncratic graphics of Oleg Denisenko have a feeling of arcane instructional diagrams from some otherworldly past.

Denisenko is a Ukrainian printmaker, painter, calligrapher and sculptor. His intricately rendered images of figures, horses and fantastical mechanisms always seem connected to the past, and rich with potential meaning, but unfettered in imagination.

Since I originally wrote about Denisenko’s work back in 2007, he now has a dedicated website on which you will find an array of his graphics, his equally whimsical sculpture and works in color he identifies as levkas (image above, second from bottom).

As near as I can tell, the term refers to the grounds used by medieval Russian iconographers. Denisenko’s works in this category are rough surfaced, texturally three dimensional and apparently done in oil and/or tempera.

His graphics, however, steal the show, inviting you to spend time delving into their elaborate rendering and fascinating details.

[Originally via BibliOdyssey]

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.