Contemporary Fine Art & Original Prints | ebo Gallery

Hyakunen no Hana (Flowers of a Hundred Years): A special bijin series devoted to women of the 20th century by Paul Binnie

“In 2012 I began a new bijin series, Hyakunen no Hana (Flowers of a Hundred Years), which highlights the changing roles, political issues, social situations and lifestyles of women in Japan in the 20th century, decade by decade. Each print illustrates a beauty featuring the hair and clothing fashions of that era, beginning in 1900, but also explores the real lives of the women of those times, how their traditional roles were in constant flux as Japan itself evolved dramatically throughout the twentieth century. The series has twelve designs, one for each decade of the past century and a final one for 2010, and at the conclusion of the series, collectors who to subscribe for all of the prints receive a bonus chuban design.

In this series, I have returned to the large format and very lavish printing previously seen in his well-known Shiki (Four Seasons) prints of 2003-2005, utilising various types of mica, silver and bronze metallic pigments, embossing, multiple overprintings and shadings and 23 carat gold leaf. All of these new designs are printed over 40 times to achieve a richness and depth of color rarely seen in contemporary printmaking, and I work with both very traditional methods of woodblock printing as well as some of the new innovations of the modern print world, such as baren sujizuri, or swirling lines of printing, and goma zuri (sesame printing) when the paper is only lightly pressed on the ink to give a mottled or broken color application. These printing effects are derived from Shin Hanga (New Prints) and Sosaku Hanga (Creative Prints) respectively, the two early twentieth century print movements which revived woodblock printing in Japan.

Those who have already subscribed will receive matched-number edition numbers from this series as before.” – Paul Binnie

MOGA / A Modern Girl of 1920

Senkyuhakunijuunen no Moga / A Modern Girl (of 1920)

Hyakunen no Hana series (Flowers of a Hundred Years), Woodblock, 2013. Print size: 18 ½ x 13 inches. Image size: 17 1/2 x 11 1/2 in. Signed, numbered and titled. Edition: 100. Condition: Excellent. Price: $1,100

“The newest print in the current series of twentieth century beauties, Hyakunen no Hana (Flowers of a Hundred Years) shows a Modern Girl of 1920. The Japanese title Moga, is a contraction of the first two syllables of the two words of the phrase; i.e. ‘modan‘ (modern) and ‘garu‘ (girl). Moga were a cultural phenomenon similar to flappers in the West, young women who escaped from the paternalism and family controls of previous decades and did many things the older generations found shocking. They cut their hair into shorter styles, wore western-style clothes, smoked cigarettes and drank alcohol – such as the Manhattan cocktails we see here –  while dancing or flirting with young men (hence two cocktails), things we might take for granted today, but which were a complete break with expectations of more traditional Japanese society. The 1920s were an economic boom period, and young women could have jobs that gave them freedom to live their lives away from controls and restrictions imposed by their parents’ generation. A flood of images and ideas from the West entered Japan between the wars, and the colour scheme of this design reflects the red, white and blue of the USA, Britain and France, all countries Moga were fascinated by.

There is a famous and rare print by the Shin Hanga (New Prints) artist Kobayakawa Kiyoshi called Horoyoi (Tipsy) of 1930, and this was a reference point for my Moga, particularly in the strong deep-red background. However, Kiyoshi seems to criticise his slightly drunk, chubby and bleary-eyed model, whereas my feeling about the new freedoms of the period is one of wholehearted support, and I celebrate the new-found independence women were taking for themselves at this time.

The new print is in the same format as the first two designs in the set, Kuchi-e and Ebicha Hakama, a large Dai-Oban format. As before in this set, the printing is lavish, and as well as 47 colour and bokashi (shading) printings, it employs mica, embossing, silver metallic pigment and 23-carat gold leaf.” - Paul Binnie

Ebicha Hakama / Maroon Hakama of 1910

Ebicha Hakama / Maroon Hakama of 1910

Hyakunen no Hana series (Flowers of a Hundred Years), Woodblock, 2012.  Print size: 18 ½ x 13 inches.  Image size: 17 1/2 x 11 1/2 in. Signed, numbered and titled. Edition: 100. Condition: Excellent. Price: $1,100

“The second print in the series Hyakunen no Hana (Flowers of a Hundred Years), is called Ebicha Hakama, or Maroon Hakama of 1910, referring to the trouser-like over-kimono worn by the girl in the print, which identifies her as a female university student. Women’s universities were founded in the first decade of the 20^th century, such as the Japan Women’s College (now University) in 1901 in Tokyo and several others throughout Japan soon after. By 1910, it was becoming acceptable for young women to consider a university education instead of an early marriage, and this young woman wears the usual hakama over her kimono to symbolise a female student of that time. Maroon hakama became such a symbol of female education that the wife of the artist Kaburagi Kiyokata, a well-known intellectual called Tsuzuri Teru, was kept distant from the artist’s family by his mother, who declared ‘she did not like maroon hakama’ – and, we may assume, all that they implied about the wearer.

Hakama, worn by both men and women in Japan in the ancient past, allowed freedom of movement and kept the kimono clean rather like an apron, so were a useful item of clothing for certain classes of society and professions. Of course, in traditional depictions of Heian female writers, such as Murasaki Shikibu or Ono no Komachi, they are inevitably wearing hakama, but this garment had fallen out of favour with women until a revival in the late 19^th century. We might imagine, in a typical Meiji mix of East and West, that this girl is wearing high, buttoned leather boots on her feet, and many female students even had a blouse under their kimono too.

Technically this is a very complex design – it employs 47 printings, including silver metallic pigment and 23 carat gold leaf in the hair ribbon motifs of laurels symbolising academic achievement, and there is fine mica admixed with the maroon of the hakama to give a dull lustre rather than a glitter, so suggest heavy wool serge. The title and Binnie in the bottom margin are embossed, and there are many areas of bokashi – hand shading, particularly on the kimono sleeves, which shade from mauve to yellow in two intensities of colour, overlaid with orange squares, also in bokashi. The print is a very large oban size closer to two Edo or Meiji-period oban prints, as was the first design.” – Paul Binnie

Senkyuhyaku-nen no Kuchi-e / A Frontispiece Illustration of 1900

Senkyuhyaku-nen no Kuchi-e / A Frontispiece Illustration of 1900

- Hyakunen no Hana series (Flowers of a Hundred Years), Woodblock, 2012.  Print size: 18 ½ x 13 inches.  Image size: 17 1/2 x 11 1/2 in. Signed, numbered and titled. Edition: 100. Condition: Excellent. Price: $1,100

“A new print design for May 2012, and also the first image in a new series of Japanese beauties, Kuchi-e, (Frontispiece Illustration), will be the first in a series called ‘Hyakunen no Hana’ or Flowers of a Hundred Years. The series will highlight the changing roles, political and social situations and lifestyles of women in Japan in the 20th century, decade by decade.

The full title of the first print is ‘Senkyuhyaku-nen no Kuchi-e’, or A Frontispiece Illustration of 1900, and it shows a young, middle-class woman looking at the woodblock printed illustration in the front of a copy of Bungei Kurabu, a very popular literary magazine aimed at a female audience. By 1900 there were several magazines like this one, all of which serialised works of new and older fiction and might include poetry and criticism. The important point is that by this time, the educational reforms of the Meiji government meant that women were now on an equal footing with men in being taught to read and write to a functioning level, so Japan had become a nation with universal literacy. The situation was such that the female population, which had remained largely neglected during the previous Edo period, now had the skills to read and write competently and had access to literature, even supporting a specific genre of literary magazines aimed at women.

The model has a reformed hairstyle, looser than the traditional Shimada hairstyle and closer to the circa 1900 ‘Gibson Girl’ hairstyle of Western nations, and she has chosen to have no combs or decorations in it, even though she continues to wear kimono and not Western dress, symbolic of the types of stylistic mixes one sees around Meiji 33 (1900). This new style of hair tends to be linked to educated, forward-thinking women in illustrations of the period, and so seems right for our literate magazine subscriber.

In the print the young woman is studying a kuchi-e of a Heian beauty, a popular subject at the time and also in this case a reference to the great literary women of the past, such as Murasaki Shikibu, Sei no Shonagon and Ono no Komachi, among many others. The kuchi-e is palely printed using baren sujizuri to suggest that we are seeing the reverse of the image, and the darker green on the cover of the book as well as the background are highlighted with sprinkled mica. In addition, the collar of her inner kimono is embellished with 24 carat gold squares, printed in a ‘kirigane’ or cut gold style, and the edge of the leaves of the magazine are embossed, as are the title and series title in the upper left margin, and Binnie in the lower margin.” – Paul Binnie

We at ebo Gallery mourn the passing of celebrated artist  Will Barnet, who died at his home in New York on Tuesday. He was 101.

Here is an article from the Portland Press Herald written by Bob Keyes:

Maine-linked painter Will Barnet dies at 101

A comprehensive look at Betty Merken’s signature approach to Printmaking in her Seattle studio by Amanda Allen

https://vimeo.com/48839964

Topophilia- Ma and Ki

USA Projects is a dynamic new creative community that connects people with great artists and helps them to make tax-deductible contributions to projects.

To learn more about how to support this project, please click on the link below:

http://www.usaprojects.org/project/topophilia_ma_and_ki

Two interesting videos of Jean Gumpper recounting her recent experience during an artist residency in Death Valley last April.

http://radiocoloradocollege.org/2012/02/in-the-shadow-of-the-valley-of-death-valley-part-1

http://radiocoloradocollege.org/2012/02/life-in-death-valley-part-2

Anja Percival: Printmaking Video

For the purposes of Printfest 2010, Anja Percival produced a short film to demonstrate the techniques that she most commonly uses. This is now available to view online:

http://vimeo.com/22773385

Painting at 99, With No Compromises

Joshua Kristal for The New York Times

“The old masters are still alive after 400 years, and that’s what I want to be,” the artist Will Barnet, 99, says.

New York Times Article, October 26, 2010

By Robin Finn

Published: October 26, 2010

Propelled by a scholarship to the Art Students League, Will Barnet, an aspiring artist with a portfolio heavy on seascapes and family cat portraiture, left Boston for New York City in 1931 with $10 in his pocket. It was summer, it was hot, and besides the Depression-era garbage rotting in the streets, the air was ripe with raucous political protest. He rented a room for a $1 a night, gorged on cheap baked beans at the Automat and started sketching the forlorn and angry faces he saw on every corner. He was 19 and “radicalized” by possibility.

“I felt like Gary Cooper,” he recalled, “like a cowboy in a Western movie.” He roamed the city the way his idol, Honoré Daumier, had wandered through Paris; it was his muse. His style: stark, brooding social realism.

Eight decades later, hard of hearing but still tart of tongue, Mr. Barnet continues to paint every day — abstract forms, oddly hued and, as ever, deeply felt. His evolution as a modern American painter is on display this month in “Will Barnet and the Art Students League,” an exhibition that honors his centennial year and his influence on generations of artists, and includes works by renowned league students and colleagues like Louise Bourgeois and James Rosenquist.

“I’ve seen it all but I want to see more,” said Mr. Barnet, who lost the use of his left leg two years ago after a fall. “I have no opinion on what it means to be 99 except that it’s different from being 19. I used to work 8, 9, 10 hours a day,” he said. Now he paints three or four hours despite his inability to stand. “I didn’t compromise, ever,” he added. “The old masters are still alive after 400 years, and that’s what I want to be.”

Mr. Barnet, whose art career began with his painting self-portraits in his parents’ basement in Beverly, Mass., “according to the way Rembrandt worked, with the light coming over my left shoulder,” is a symbol of 20th-century American inimitability. He’s the guy who abstained when the establishment went gaga over abstract expressionism (“Most of those paintings felt like accidents”). But his major works from the 1950s to ‘70s — abstract and figurative, Byzantine and Indian Space — now sell for up to $400,000. He has had 80 one-man shows, the most recent this spring at the Alexandre Gallery, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim and the Whitney all have his work — usually in storage. (“They don’t show artists of my nature; the Whitney hasn’t shown my work in 30 years,” he said.)

“He took a very independent route, often in contrast to what was the popular or easy direction, but it was the art world that was contrary, not Will,” said Robert Kane, an expressionist colorist painter and former student of Mr. Barnet’s whose work is included in the retrospective. “There’s a quote of Picasso’s that is, to me, the secret of Will: ‘Some people make a red dot and it’s the sun; other people make the sun and it’s just a red dot.’ ”

A fan of Picasso, Ingres and Cezanne, Mr. Barnet wanted to be a modern American painter in a 20th-century American city: the league was a Mecca for modernists. Neither his parents’ indifference (his father was a machinist in a shoe factory) nor the suicide of Jules Pascin, who was to be his first teacher at the league in 1931, deterred him. “I had to be an artist and not sacrifice myself for anything but art,” he recalled.

Mr. Barnet knew no one in New York, but he arrived with a letter of introduction from a friend at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston who had an Armenian uncle in the city, the surrealist artist Arshile Gorky. Mr. Barnet hiked downtown to his studio unannounced. Standing on the sidewalk, he heard shouting. He knocked anyway. Turned out Mr. Gorky was infuriated because overnight, mice had destroyed a collage that included cheese among its media.

After calming down, Mr. Gorky took Mr. Barnet for an instructive stroll, at one point stopping outside a shoe shop with a fancifully painted business sign. “Young man,” he said, “there’s the future of art in America.” Mr. Barnet kept his mouth shut, but he has never been a fan of what would become known as Pop Art. The closest he came to being a commercial artist were the poster editions of his 1970s prints (“Woman Reading” is the best known); some editions sold for $300,000, but there were no sequels or variants.

Over the years, Mr. Barnet’s work morphed from social realism to a nuanced abstraction that used flat planes of color to convey emotion and depth; in his prime, he segued from pure abstraction to pure figuration and back. As a teacher, he elevated printmaking to an art form and emphasized to painters the difference between fine art and the transfer of object to canvas.

“I never wanted to repeat myself,” he says. “And that drove some art dealers crazy. I love moving on and finding fresh ways to use color and form. That’s been my excitement.”

He was appointed league printer in 1935 for $15 a week, and taught art there from 1942 to 1979 (Mark Rothko was his printmaking student in 1951). No canvas left his studio unless he had spent at least three years getting it absolutely, obsessively right.

“I had seen some of his paintings on the wall outside the classroom and thought, ‘Here’s someone who sees something no one else sees,’ ” said the urban muralist Knox Martin, whose work is also included in the exhibition, at the league’s gallery on West 57th Street. “He was the first human being I ever met who could communicate what art was.”

Mr. Barnet said he once painted Gypsy Rose Lee’s portrait for rent money, though he has forgotten what she paid: $20, or maybe $50. His 1934 lithograph “Cafeteria Scene” was purchased by the league for its permanent collection. Philip Alexandre, who owns the gallery that represents him, said that over the past decade Mr. Barnet and his work have begun to experience a pleasant art establishment phenomenon — “a reassessment of value,” noting: “Younger artists are discovering him, and that’s key.”

Mr. Barnet and his wife of 58 years, Elena, moved in 1982 from the Upper West Side to a duplex at the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park that includes his first genuine studio.

It has a full wall of two-story windows facing north. The other walls display paintings, some 15 feet high, like the austere winter portrait of his and Elena’s daughter, Oona, and grandson, Will, on ice skates in Maine, circa 1980. The original pencil sketch for “Woman Reading” — a 1970 oil painting and later a popular poster — depicting Elena and their cat, Madame Butterfly, hangs in the living room. The reason for the bald spots on the walls: he lent several paintings to the league and to a show being presented at Montclair State University, where his son Peter teaches painting. Another son, Richard, is a sculptor who teaches at the league, and a third son, Todd, is a lawyer; all three were born during his 10-year marriage to Mary Sinclair, a painter.

Mr. Barnet mixes colors himself, and keeps a sheet of waxed paper over them to assure freshness. He sits beside his canvas in the wheeled office chair he relies on to get around the studio. A gigantic 150-year-old wooden easel looms behind him, unused; the wall, more accessible, now doubles as his easel. Hundreds of paintbrushes are guarded by a stuffed raven he refers to as “the early bird.” He cannot climb stairs anymore, so he sleeps on a daybed in the studio; when he leaves the apartment to go out to dinner or to a gallery, he begrudgingly uses the wheelchair parked in the hall.

Mortality is on his mind.

“Let me tell you a story,” he said, digging into a saucer of frozen Georgia pecans (his other favorite snack is 72 percent dark chocolate, which he discovered 50 years ago, way ahead of the curve). “My grandfather was 96 years old, and one foggy night in Beverly, Mass., he went walking and was hit and injured by a drunken driver.

“He was lying in bed dying of a fractured skull, and my father took me at the age of 6 to say goodbye to him. And I’ll never forget what he said: ‘Do you think it’s easy to die at the age of 96?’ ”