Some Rembrandt landscape etchings

Well, I am somewhat functional and at my post again. I would like to thank Lori Woodward again for filling in for me. I have an extensive post over at Fine Art Views that you can read by clicking here. It is an Ask Stape column. It has a good level of cheerful mayhem and general wickedness to it.

The etching above is the best known of Rembrandt's landscape etchings. It resembles his paintings more than his other etchings.There are small figures scattered throughout this etching.The presentations I am doing on etching are merely to build your interest. I hope that the next time you are at the art museum you will stop and look more closely at the etchings displayed there . Because I am merely an aficionado and not a scholar, I can only hope to incite you to greater discovery on your own. If I can convince you that this stuff is interesting and fun I will have succeeded.

The plate is very heavily worked. That is, it has been bitten in the acid a number of times and had passages reworked by burnishing. Here's what that means. Because of the softness of the copper, the plate can be reworked more than you might expect. A three sided scraper is used to remove the burr and level the surface of the plate somewhat. Then using a tool called a burnisher which looks a little like a narrow steel spoon, set into a wooden handle the area of the plate to be "erased" can be polished flat again. Then the artist regrounds and etches the passage again. There is a limit to how much of this you can do, but it is possible to radically redesign a plate and Rembrandt did this routinely. This is one of the reasons why the scholars have studied the states of his different plates so much.

The long and low plate above is typical of the Rembrandt etchings. The format is appropriate to the low county where he worked. This one has an L design, and is so standard I really don't know that I need to analyze it much other than to say it falls into the balance or steelyard concept. A whole bunch of stuff and a strong vertical (the tree) are balanced by the great expanse of space on the right. Because of the small size typical of etchings and the fine line used, etchings are often full of fine detail and meant to be looked at very closely. That gives a different sort of design sensibility than something which needs to communicate big simple shapes across a distance like a large painting or mural decoration. The print above looks a little "crabbed" in our reproduction here. If you had it in front of you it would look precious. There is a relationship between scale and design. We see so many things in reproduction and are less aware of that, because reproduction presents large murals and tiny cabinet pictures the same size. Viewing distance effects how an image needs to be designed.


Everything in the etching above (and the one above that) marches from left to right and gradually into the distance, that's a nice device to install in your own paintings. The opposite and far less effective approach is to string everything across the picture plane equidistant to the viewer. That is static, less interesting and doesn't convey the viewer deep into the image, but across its surface. A great way to get a landscape design to recede is to put the nearest object in the left hand corner and then the next item behind that and so forth. Each successive part of the landscape steps back further into space. Usually you will have to install this as much as observe it.

That's a pretty daring placement of that tower, almost right in the center. There's a common trick for doing that too. What Rembrandt has done is put one of the edges of the object on the center and then hang the rest one way or the other out from there. This is something I have done many times in landscapes myself. Balancing that central tower are three spots of dark, (there is a design motif called a three spot by the way). The first is a little grouping of trees to the right of the tower, the second is the dark mass of bushes at the center on the bottom, and the third dark spot is in the house at the left. These darks "orbiting" the tower divert our eye a little from its central location . They also encourage us to explore the picture and find the different areas that Rembrandt has included to entertain us.

Images from the Athenaeum.org

Tonight, a special guest star! Lori Woodward

My apologies to readers tonight, I said I was exhausted last night, but today I discovered that what I was,was sick. So I am going to let a guest author, my virtual friend Lori Woodward take the helm as I roll unconscious into the scuppers. This post is from Fine Arts Views, for whom I have been writing a little myself. I thought that what she wrote was excellent and I like that she said without hesitation some of the things which often go unspoken, the proverbial elephant in the room. I wish I had written this myself.
So put on your magnetic beanies and get out the moth abdomens, this lady knows what she is talking about.

20% Dream and Scheme, 80% DO

by Lori Woodward

Today's Post is by Lori Woodward, Regular contributing writer for FineArtViews. She is also a contributing editor for American Artist's Watercolor and Workshop magazines. She writes "The Artist's Life" blog on American Artists' Forum and is a regular contributor here on Fine Art Views. Lori is a member of The Putney Painters, an invitational group that paints under the direction of Richard Schmid and Nancy Guzik. Find out how you can be a guest author.


I believe that some of us creative types are inclined to spend a little too much time in the "dream" department and not enough time in the "do" department.

My elementary school report cards show hard evidence that I was a dreamer from the start. Words like, "looking out the window", "day-dreaming", "unable to focus" described my general behavior. In first grade, I ended up meeting with the school district psychologist weekly to see what the problem was. He reported that I was intelligent and needed to skip first grade. That didn't happen, and it would have been a big mistake if it had. My disinterest in school work had nothing to do with my aptitude... it had much more to do with the fact that I am a dreamer from the very core of my being.

The World Needs Dreamers Who Perform

Now don't get me wrong... Dreaming is a great thing because the world needs dreamers. Most artists are dreamers by nature, but the hard cold fact remains that if we spend the bulk of our time dreaming and scheming, and not creating great work, our dreams are not likely to ever come true.

Ask any successful artist how much time he/she spends actually creating artwork, and you'll find that time in the studio far exceeds time either planning or dreaming. You see, they settled on some plans and dreams early on and then took immediate action in pursing those dreams. I am honored to call a handful of highly successful artists my personal friends. I see how they conduct their careers and their marketing efforts. They all have one thing in common... they are productive. They paint/work whether they feel like it or not. They put the horse before the cart, first creating a dynamite work and afterwords, they apply the best marketing tools to get their work before collectors' eyes. In fact, these artists didn't have a hard time getting into galleries because the quality of their work is evident.

I'm going out on a limb here, and this might make some of you angry, but I have to say it because this is what I believe...

Marketing your art gets easier when your artwork is remarkable!

It's absolutely true that you don't have to be the best artist in the world or even in your locality to make a good living at it. There are many types of collectors who buy for a variety of reasons. But! If you desire to show in Scottsdale, Santa Fe, or New York City in a high profile gallery, you're going to have to be better at what you do than most artists in order to knock the socks off of the gallery manager and thereby amaze their regular collectors.

So, let me get back to my premise: If you spend any more than 20% of your time dreaming and planning, which implies that the remaining 80% should be spent creating work, you're not going to have enough work to make a living at it. It usually takes years of concerted effort to get good enough to entice the best collectors. Talent means very little - education, practice and "doing" are the real keys to success. At least these have been the keys of the artists I personally know who are wildly successful. By the way, many of them did not posses much "talent" during the early learning phases of their careers. More often, a good education combined with years of working is the way to get "talented".

Collectors are savvy spenders. You can't fool them into buying your artwork.

I haven't taught an art marketing workshop lately because I feel bad for the artists who think they can sell their work simply by paying for ads, submitting portfolios to galleries and "doing all the right things". All these things are necessary at some point, but not before their work is pretty darned good. Some amateur artists (those still in the learning process) just can't see the difference between their work and the work of seasoned professionals. Maybe they do, but think they can fool the collecting public by falsely talking up their work. Some, who are still in the beginning stages of learning, state that they are award winning artists on their resume. Those awards are not listed in their bio, and I wonder what awards they are talking about.

But don't give up just because you're not at the professional level yet. Anyone who has desire, intelligence, and self-discipline can get there. It helps to realize even the most celebrated professionals started out as a beginners.

Many of you who read this newsletter are experiencing the career of your dreams, and I'd be willing to bet you worked hard to get there. No dream ever comes true without concerted effort.

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Back to Piranesi

A self portrait of Piranesi.

Here we are, back in the 1700's you have logged on to see some wacko display baroque etchings. It amazes me there is any interest in this stuff at all. in fact I think a few years ago there was no interest.

Above is the forum of Nerva, which is from the Roman etchings and not the Carceri, or prisons. I thought it was interesting how the ancient architecture has been woven into the city. I have been to Rome, but only briefly. I guess this must still exist. I would like to see it. If Dickens were an etcher in 18th century Rome, this is what his work would have looked like.
This is, of course from the Prisons series. If you squint at it you will see that it is one big light shape surrounded and in some places invaded by one big dark shape. All of the darks are hooked together into one large shape. If you were to put your finger down anywhere on that dark you could move anywhere within that large shape without lifting your finger. I have written before about linking your darks here. Piranesi has been criticized for overdoing the chiaroscuro and also called the Rembrandt of architecture. I like the intricate shapes of all of that fell machinery he has silhouetted before the light middle ground of the painting.

This one seems less organized then some others it lacks the large unifying darks that holds the one above together. You can see an enormous collection of Piranesi's work here. I believe tomorrow I will stay with etching but back and continue showing the etchings of Rembrandt. I have to end for tonight, I am too exhausted to continue, that happens sometimes.

Building a crate

Above is a worksheet for designing a shipping crate. This was designed by my clever wife. I posted this some time ago here. I needed to build a crate today, so I photographed the process, for you. I began by filling in one of my crate maps that makes it easy to do the math, and avoids the screw ups that for some reason are really easy to do building crates. I then took it to my local big box retailer, and had them cut to the right size for me the two pieces of luan plywood and I found two eight foot 1 by 3's. The whole show cost me about twenty five dollars.

I threw them in the back of my car and when I arrived home I took them to my basement workshop.There is the crate map filled in and sitting on the luan.

Here I have cut the 1 by 3's with a handsaw. I could have used my table saw or chop saw but since they were small and I only had four cuts to make, it seemed easier just to do it by hand. Elapsed time, perhaps ten minutes. I did this by marking them off with the luan, no tape measure.

Here is my battery drill , I have put the luan onto the sides and ends with ordinary drywall screws. This makes a real tough package and it looks neat and professional. With all that is moving around the country this week I want my painting protected on its journey.

Below is the crate ready to accept the painting. I suppose it is twenty minutes of work . I am no carpenter and this is a crate, not a Sheraton highboy. But it will do for my purposes.

The painting I am shipping is a 30 by 40 and it is on oversized stretchers. If I had a frame the box would have to be deeper but since this is just the painting the depth is only 2 and 1/2 inches which is the width of a 1 by 3.

Tomorrow morning I will put the painting into the box and and secure it with some packing materials and screw the top on, again with drywall screws. I called my favorite shipper, ADCOM at 1.800.622.1147, but they told me, as I suspected that they could save me lots of money on a group of crates but not as much on one. So I called FEDEX and arranged a pickup with them for tomorrow. I like to use express shipping for paintings. They are valuable and I think they get better handling.

Tomorrow, back to 18th century etchings.