“White Cranes Flying Over Breakers” by Ando Hiroshige

"White Cranes Flying Over Breakers" by Ando Hiroshige
“White Cranes Flying Over Breakers” by Ando Hiroshige from the Worcester Art Museum

“Hiroshige’s artistic life may be characterized in several stages. The first was his student period, from about 1811 to 1830, when he largely followed the work of his elders in the field of figure prints—girls, actors, and samurai, or warriors. The second was his first landscape period, from 1830 to about 1844, when he created his own romantic ideal of landscape design and bird-and-flower prints and brought them to full fruition with his famed Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō and other series of prints depicting landscape vistas in Japan. His last stage was his later period of landscape and figure-with-landscape designs, from 1844 to 1858, during which overpopularity and overproduction tended to diminish the quality of his work.”

Biography credit: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hiroshige

Order your own reproduction of this piece and many more by Ando Hiroshige from RequestAPrint! Custom sizing and framing available! https://www.requestaprint.net/worcester/itemdetail.php?work_id=329&gallery_id=5

RequestAPrint on NCIS

Images from the Navy Art Collection will soon be on the set of the hit TV show, NCIS, starring Mark Harmon. The images featured are reproductions of Morgan Ian Wilbur works: “USS Cornado Rides A Sparkling Sea”, “Naval Air Over Korea”, “Steam For Speed”, and “Turnin’ & Burnin’”.

The episode will be shot from March 7th through March 18th. Keep an eye out for the upcoming season that will feature these pieces as set props!

About the Artist: Julie Mehretu

“Stadia II, 2004” by Julie Mehretu. Carnegie Museum of Art.

Julie Mehretu (Ethiopian/American, b.1970) is an Abstract printmaker and painter. She was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and moved to Michigan with her family in 1977. She began her education at the University Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, and then went on to earn a BA in Art from Kalamazoo College, and a MFA from the Rhode Island School of Art and Design in 1997.

To order your own reproduction of the piece above visit RequestAPrint.

Mehretu has lived and worked in New York, NY, since beginning her career in 1999, but she also has a studio in Berlin that she uses for part of each year. She produces large scale prints, drawings, and paintings that use heavy layering to create Abstract imagery from patterns and architectural photographs. Hundreds of thin and translucent layers of paint and paper cover the canvas of each painting. Critics have linked her work to nonliteral art movements ranging from Futurism to Constructivism. All of her works, regardless of format, involve symbolism drawn from graffiti, city maps, and comic book graphics. Explosions and sharp or arching line work are constant themes running throughout her body of work. Mehretu has drawn inspiration from the large-scale works of Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman.

One of the artist’s most widely known works is the 80-foot-wide mural located in Goldman Sachs tower entitled Mural. It is visible from the street, and was commissioned by the banking firm in 2010. Her painting Untitled 1is also popular and sold for over US$1,000,000 at Sotheby’s auction house in 2010. Mehretu’s drawings were included in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York entitled Drawing Now: Eight Propositions in 2002. The Palazzo Grassi in Venice also hosted her work for their Praise Of Doubt exhibition in 2011. Her first major solo exhibition, Grey Area, took place at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2010. Her current body of work is part of a permanent collection in the Museum of Modern Art. Representation for Mehretu is handled by Marian Goodman Gallery in New York and White Cube of London. She has received the Berlin Prize, a MacArthur Foundation Award, and the American Art Award. Mehretu lives and works in New York and Berlin, Germany.

 

Jerome Biederman: Capturing Transportation

“1955 Ford Hardtop Thunderbird” by Jerome Biederman. Detroit Historical Society.

Born in 1913, Jerome Biederman was a nationally recognized illustrator of transportation. Whether his subject was an automobile, aircraft, or locomotive, his renderings were technically accurate and highly detailed. His medium of choice was tempera paint on illustration board.

The above image is from the Detroit Historical Society’s collection of Biederman prints. They are all available for custom reproduction through RequestAPrint. 

After graduating from the American Academy of Art in Chicago, he entered the advertising world where he did almost everything except illustration. By 1940, he chose to leave the corporate advertising world and return to the creative atmosphere of a studio.

For many years, Biederman’s steadiest assignments and commissions came from calendar companies. His work appeared regularly in Automobile Quarterly, Horseless Carriage Gazette and other magazines.
Before Biederman passed away in 1996, he donated many of his illustrations to the Detroit Historical Society’s collection.

To see more of Jerome Biederman’s work visit the RequestAPrint gallery.

John James Audubon: Birds of America

 

“Barn Owl” by John James Audubon. Peabody Institute Library

John James Audubon was born in Les Cayes, in what is now Haiti, on April 26, 1785. The illegitimate son of French plantation owner Captain Jean Audubon and his Creole servant Jeanne Rabin, he was given the name Jean Rabin at birth. However, when his mother died shortly after his birth, he and his sister were sent to Nantes, France, where they were raised by the captain’s wife, Anne. The couple legally adopted the children in 1794 and gave Jean a new name: Jean-Jacques Fougère Audubon.

The above image is available for custom reproduction from RequestAPrint. All sales benefit the Peabody Institute Library. 

By 1824, Audubon had grown intent on finding a publisher for his work, but was unable to generate any serious interest in the United States. Two years later, he set sail for the United Kingdom, where he hoped to at least be able to find engravers skilled enough to properly reproduce his work. The decision immediately proved a good one. He exhibited his work in both Scotland and England to great acclaim, fascinating the public with his impressive drawing skills as well as some tall tales he relayed about life on the American frontier.

The success of his exhibitions would finally lead to the first publication of the book for which he is now best known: Birds of America. Featuring more than 400 plates of his drawings, the four-volume work was printed in London by Havell & Son in 1827 and serialized until 1838. Accompanying it was Ornithological Biography, which featured text about the lives and behaviors of his subjects as well as highlights about Audubon’s adventures. He followed these seminal works with 1839’s A Synopsis of the Birds of North America.

Throughout this period, Audubon traveled back and forth between the United States and Europe, overseeing the publication of his works and also selling them in popular serialized subscriptions to admirers who included King George IV and United States President Andrew Jackson. His fame and fortune firmly established, in 1841 Audubon moved his family to a large rural estate on the Hudson in upper Manhattan, where he began work on a more compact edition of Birds of America.

See the whole John James Audubon gallery from the Peabody Library Institute here. 

(Information from: biography.com)