As the US continues to re-issue its paper currency in new designs that are devoid of visual interest, removing most of what was good about the old engravings and making our dead presidents even deader, other nations around the world indulge in beautiful, colorful designs on their currency.

In addition, paper money from many countries features poets, artists, scientists, explorers and literary figures instead of just political figures; not to mention turtles, tikis, and tropical forests.

Psdtuts+, a tips and tutorials site aimed at Photoshop users, has collected a few interesting examples of colorful and artistically interesting paper money from around the world in an article titled The Art of Currency: Unique Notes from Around the World.

It’s art you can fold over and put in your pocket.

18th Century Venetian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi was famous for his elaborate engravings of the fantastic architectural ruins of Rome.

He is even more well known for a set of 14 copper plate etchings titled Carceri (“Prisons”). These are architectural fantasies, “capricious inventions” as they are described on the title page. Their monumental size, grand design and Escher-like defiance of architectural realities are a far cry from the shabby dungeons that were the actual prisons of the day.

Loosely based on stage set designs, they show Piranesi indulging in his fascination with monumental Roman architecture; creating a fanciful series of structures and interiors in which he gets to play with perspective, geometry, scale, lighting and shadow effects.

The Surrealists admired Piranesi’s dreamlike evocations of imaginary spaces, and students of etching have praised his exploration of the medium, using etching needles, burin and burnisher in a variety of ways to achieve his effects.

The Art Gallery of Albeta in Edmonton is hosting an exhibition of images from the Carceri d’invenzione (Imaginary Prisons) series titled Piranesi’s Prisons: Architecture of Mystery and Imagination that is on display until November 7, 2010.

There doesn’t seem to be a catalog associated with the exhibit. A book of the etching series, The Prisons / Le Carceri is available from Amazon.

The museum also doesn’t appear to have an online preview of the exhibition. I’ve listed some links and resources for Piranesi below.

The best images of Piranesi’s etchings I’ve found are on the New York Public Library Digital Gallery. Click on the images for a larger version; you can click through in sequence at either size. There is a zoom button that pops up a new window and allows you to zoom in on parts of the image, albeit in a frustratingly small window. (Note that in addition to impressions from the Prisons series, there are many more works here; there are 6 pages of thumbnails for Piranesi. Wonderful images of grand Roman architecture and more.)

There is also a nice section on Piranesi as part of the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, with a detail page on the Round Tower from Prison series. (See my post on the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History.)

There is an interesting blog post from Murray Ewing about piranesi’s effect on pop culture and cinema, and for an interesting twist on Piranesi’s series by a contemporary collage artist, see my post on Emily Allchurch.

According to an early biography of Piranesi, he is reported to have said:

“I need to produce great ideas, and I believe that if I were commissioned to design a new universe, I would be mad enough to undertake it.”

[Thanks to ianehunt, @condottiere94 (Twitter page) for the suggestion]

I’ve written before about the beautiful etchings of James McNeill Whistler, whose work as an etcher is even less well known than his paintings.

On Beauty and the Everyday: The Prints of James McNeill Whistler is a new exhibition opening this Saturday, August 21, 2010, at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, which has one of the most extensive collections of Whistler’s graphic work in the U.S.

The collection, which you can preview here, contains examples of some of Whistler’s finest and best known etchings.

Unfortunately, both the exhibition page preview (link for “More Images” at bottom) and the above images of the collection (meant to facilitate ordering slide sets) are small.

Etchings by their nature are subtle, with delicate lines against toned papers. This is part of their unique visual charm, but it makes them difficult to do justice in reproduction. There are some larger images on the site of the Frick Collection in New York. You can find impressions of some of the same etchings in both collections.

Some of the best online reproductions I’ve found are on the University of Glasgow’s site for James Mcneill Whistler: The Etchings, A Catalog Raisonne. Unfortunately the Catalog Raisonne mentioned is a book project, and the online resources are from from complete, but what is there is large enough to appreciate some of the subtlety of Whistler’s touch. You have to drill down a bit. Go to “Exhibition”, scroll down, click on the thumbnail to access the detail page, then click again on the image for the large version.

Next best may be the online images from the Freer Sackler Online Collections.

You will sometimes find the same etching in different “states”, impressions pulled form the plate at various stages of the artist’s work on the image.

Whistler was inspired by the etchings of Rembrandt, likely the finest practitioner of the art in history, and to a great degree revitalized the art in his time and placed himself high in the canon of the world’s great etchers and lithographers.

The exhibition at the University of Michigan Museum of Art continues to November 28, 2010.

For more information and links to resources, see my previous posts on James Abbott McNeill Whistler and Whistler’s Etchings. In the latter I give a brief overview of the process of creating an etching.

Etchings of James McNeill Whistler is wonderfully inexpensive Dover book.

I haven’t seen Etchings by Whistler: Sixty Photographs from Original Prints. It’s a facsimile of a book published in 1923 and I don’t know how well it’s fared in the reproduction.

Lisa Brawn is a Canadian artist working in the medium of woodcut. Unusual enough these days, she adds several elements to the process that make it even more unique.

One is her choice of wood. Woodcut a painstaking relief printmaking process in which the “negative” areas, those not to be printed, are carved away leaving the parts to be inked raised as part of the original surface (as opposed to intaglio processes, like etching, in which the lines that receive ink are lower than the surface).

Most artists working in woodcut choose wood with an even grain and smooth surface, commonly beechwood, cherry or walnut. Brawn has worked that way, but she responded to the opportunity a couple of years ago to by five truckloads of salvaged douglas fir beams from dismantled grain elevators and the restoration of the Alberta Block in Calgary, wood that has knots, holes and gouges and is often peppered with rusty nails, wood with a history, as she puts it.

Brawn has matched her quirky choice of materials with a quirky range of subjects, largely portraits of figures from history and pop culture, as well as several series of animal subjects. When searching through her online gallery of woodcuts, which you can do by year or alphabetically by subject, you can have a single page in which the subjects include Da Vinci, Dirty Harry, Dorothy Parker, David Suzuki, David Bowie, Don Cherry, the Dalai Lama, a deer and a duck.

Another aspect of her work that is unusual is the role of the woodblock itself. Usually prints are pulled from the block until it is retired at the end of the decided upon run. While Brawn pulls a small run of monochromatic prints from her blocks, it is the blocks themselves that stand out and are presented as art objects, with the raised areas painted black, as though inked, and the recessed areas painted in bright colors.

The other unusual feature of Brawn’s work is her use of patterns and decorative elements in the backgrounds, and sometimes within the faces, of her subjects.

She follows up on her other eccentricities with a penchant for alternative display spaces and unusual venues for her work, including Surgarmobile, a 1935 silver travel trailer that she used for a time as a mobile gallery.

[Via Metafilter]

Stephen Scott Young is a renowned contemporary watercolorist and etcher whose works are in major collections and museums.

Young was born in Hawaii, moved to Florida with his family at the age of 14, and studied printmaking at the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota. His watercolor technique, which frequently makes use of drybrush, is self-taught, and based on his admiration for artists like Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth and Thomas Eakins.

Young lives part time in Florida and part time in the Bahama Islands, where he finds subjects for many of his well known paintings of children. This was also a place where Homer came to paint, and Young has even done compositions that are essentially recreations of Homer paintings.

Whether at play, moody and contemplative, or even formally posed, his images of children seem to see past the surface into a moment in their lives.

The refined technique and precise draftsmanship applied to his subjects are often set off against loosely suggested backgrounds, rendered together in a muted palette with accents of brighter color.

Young also works in etching, drypoint and silverpoint drawing.

[Via Artist Daily]

Dutch artist Anton Pieck was, among other things, a painter in oil and watercolor, a printmaker in etching, engraving, lithography and woodcarving; a comics artist and an illustrator of calendars, travel books, textbooks and classics like 1001 Arabian Nights (image above, bottom).

He was also a drawing teacher at Kennemer Lyceum in Bloemendaal until he retired in 1960. Pieck was born in 1895, when the “Golden Age” of illustration was in full force. One can only assume that he was exposed to the work of the great illustrators of the time, like Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Kay Neilsen, John Bauer, and in particular, Gustave Tenngren (also here and here).

Pieck’s more popular work has a wonderful visual charm, crafted from fine detail, deft control of color and atmospheric perspective, and fascinating compositions. His illustrations for 1001 Arabian Nights are marvels of book illustration in the classic Golden Age style, vibrant with adventure, moody and evocative in their rendering, and ripe with the sublime enticement of distant lands and exotic cultures.

[Via One1more2time3's Weblog]

In my post from 2008 about Anamorphic Art, I briefly mentioned the work of Hungarian artist István Orosz.

Orosz is a graphic designer, illustrator, printmaker, poster artist, animator, stage designer and painter. He has a fascination with anamorphosis, and has several examples of his own in the gallery on his web site.

Unfortunately the site is inconvenient to deal with, one of those web site designs that is too “clever” for its own good (see my rant on How Not to Display Your Art on the Web). It opens in a pop-up, you have to wait for the white square to fill to indicate the site is loaded, and then deal with a difficult navigation system that is hidden until you roll over it and search out the links. Hints: main navigation is at the bottom, portfolio sections at the top, individual pieces in a band over the image in the center that you have to scroll through.

If you’re willing to work your way through, however, there are many interesting pieces in the section of Anamorphoses, along with illustrations, posters, paintings and Escher influenced etchings that explore the realm of impossible figures (see my posts on M.C. Escher and Andreas Aronsson).

You may find it easier to view Orosz’s work on Gallery Diabolus or Marlena Agency.

Orosz wrote an article titled The Mirrors of the Master in the book M.C. Escher’s Legacy: A Centennial Celebration.

Some of Orosz’s anamorphoses are particularly well done, in that the flat image makes perfect visual sense in itself, as in the image at top, with it’s anamorphic component hidden until revealed in the proper curved reflective surface (above, middle), as opposed to the somewhat easier paradigm of a flat image that simply appears distorted until viewed in the reflective surface.

Orosz also explores illusionistic double-images, as found in the work of Dalí and earlier artists, in which a secondary image can be seen in the main image (e.g. a face in a landscape).

I particularly like his poster designs, in which his playfully brain-teasing themes are presented in strong, simplified graphics.

Your First Print is a rich media eBook by David Bull. Bull is an English born Canadian printmaker, now living in working in Japan, who has an extraordinary devotion to the art and craft of Japanese woodblock printing.

That devotion is evident not only in his own work, but in his study of the art, and in the efforts he has made in assembling and disseminating information about the process. He has presented that information for a number of years in his extensive and highly informative website, woodblock.com, and is now extending that through a series of eBooks as part of a new publishing venture, Mokuhankan.

For background on the artist, his process and work, please see my previous post on David Bull.

Your First Print is an offshoot of the Mokuhankan venture, the primary purpose of which is to publish woodblock prints by other artists. Bull points out that though the devotion to making woodblock prints, a strong tradition in Japan, is very much alive among devotees of the art, the publication and sale of prints has faded. However, those exposed to woodblock prints for the first time are often dazzled by how beautiful they are and and how fascinating they can be.

Likewise, even those knowledgeable about western printmaking may be surprised and fascinated by the differences in the traditional methods of Japanese Woodblock printing. For example, no press is used in making an impression. The traditions of Japanese and European printmaking (which began to cross-pollinate in the 19th Century, see my post on Hokusai), have fascinating parallels as well as divergences.

Your First Print is an elegant and painstakingly crafted electronic book, in rich media PDF format, that introduces the reader to the process, providing an introduction to both those interested in pursuing the art and those who simply wish to deepen their appreciation of the process behind the art.

The eBook is divided into chapters and subchapters, taking the reader through the entire process, from selecting the materials to final printings and even troubleshooting things like misregistration and chipped or damaged blocks.

The text and photographs are supplemented with audio and video files. There are two versions. The downloadable version calls its multimedia files from the internet, the CD-ROM version is self contained. Both require version 9 of the free Adobe Reader in order to access the multimedia content (and convenient drop-down navigation). Those Mac users who, like me, prefer Preview as a PDF reader will need to use the Adobe reader if you want to access the video and audio.

There is a Sample Download PDF available (toward the bottom of this page) that gives you a preview of 24 pages from the the book (“pages” in this case actually refer to horizontal screen-wide spreads). There is also a Support Forum on the Woodblock.com site, in which readers can compare notes, ask questions and generally discuss the process of traditional Japanese printmaking.

In addition to Your First Print, there is a Catalogue of other items, with gems like classic texts by great Japanese printmakers, including Japanese Wood-Block Printing by Hiroshi Yodhida, one of my favorite printmakers.

For more on David Bull’s own work, you can view a number of his print series on the site, including his Hanga Treasure Chest small print series and the 12 prints for My Solitdes. The latter has a fascinating companion page, in which you can view interactives that allow you to click through the stages of printing impressions for the individual pieces. It is in pieces like these that I enjoy Bull’s work most, where European and Japanese visual traditions meet and blend, as in the image at left, The Seacoast in Autumn (original here).

For more on traditional Japanese woodblock prints, see some of my previous posts on Hiroshi Yoshida, Kawase Hasui, Katsushika Hokusai, Ito Shinsui, Utagawa: Masters of the Japanese Print 1770-1900 at the Brooklyn Museum and Exquisite Visions of Japan.