January has been a cruel month thus far. This past weekend I learned about the great loss of legendary artist, Antonio Frasconi, who died January 8th at the age of 93 at his home in Norwalk, Connecticut. Frasconi had a long and prestigious career as one of the America's greatest printmakers. Working primarily in wood, he illustrated over 100 books, album covers, Christmas cards, magazine illustrations and even a US postage stamp. Largely self-taught, he found inspiration in comic books as well as the works of German Expressionist artists, Jose Posada and Japanese artists such as Katsushika Hokusai and Kitagawa Utamaro. According to Douglas Martin who wrote his obituary in The New York Times, "he decried art education, saying the average student does not learn the pertinent questions, much less the answers. He abhorred art that dwelt on aesthetics at the expense of social problems. He repeatedly addressed war, racism and poverty, and devoted a decade to completing a series of woodcut portraits of people who were tortured and killed under a rightest military dictatorship in his home country, Uruguay, from 1973 to 1985." Frasconi was born in 1919 in Argentina to Italian immigrant parents, raised in Uruguay, and moved to New York to study at the Art Students' League in 1945. He loved to draw and paint, but often complained it took too long for the colors to dry. Over the course of the next sixty years he became a master woodcut artist and developed a keen sensitivity to the slightest variations in the grain of the wood. He preferred to print his work by hand, using a spoon and a baren, as he felt a machine was no match for the sensitivity of the hand and the intricacies of the ink and paper. |