Etching

Wednesday

Francesca Peacock

The art of printmaking in all its glorious complexity

Do you know your aquatint from your drypoint? Your intaglio from your lithograph? The appearance of any one finished print can vary so much from another – the feathery delicacy of etching replaced by the bold forms of linocut or the carved sinews of a woodblock – that it can be difficult to believe they all derive from the same initial process. What image appears when an object – be it carved, chemically altered, or engraved – is covered in ink and pressed into a piece of paper? As Holly Black explains, it is difficult to know when this technique first originated. Was it with the work of monks carving woodblocks in the mid-9th century to print the lines of the Diamond Sutra (now held in the British Library)? Or does it have its origins centuries earlier?

Thursday

Laura Gascoigne

Why is the smoky, febrile art of Marcelle Hanselaar so little known?

I first became aware of the work of Marcelle Hanselaar in a mixed exhibition at the Millinery Works in Islington. All I remember now about the show, and my review, is that I said she could teach Paula Rego to suck eggs. From the mischievous energy packed into her small figurative paintings I assumed she was young enough to be Rego’s granddaughter. That was in 2003; she was pushing 60. Born in Rotterdam in 1945, Hanselaar is essentially self-taught. She dropped out of art school in The Hague — it was the 1960s — and ran away to Amsterdam; what she learned about painting she picked up from the artists she lived with.