New Editions: Don Ed Hardy

Don Ed Hardy - Turner, 2014
woodcut with acrylic. Image: 37 x 27 in. Paper: 44 x 30 in. Edition of 33
Don Ed Hardy's new editions Cosmo and Turner practically crackle and spill off the page with energy and movement. In both prints Hardy finds a harmonious balance between the deep blacks of a woodcut relief print and airy, painterly washes of acrylic color.

"The dragon and the tiger are traditionally the natural primary symbols of Heaven and Earth, yin and yang," Hardy says. The artist has a lifelong interest in such imagery: as a pre-teen in the early 1950s, he would savor souvenir artworks sent back by his father from Japan. In the early 1960s, Hardy's studies of Taoist and Buddhist texts became the cornerstone of a wide-ranging artistic practice that has since brought him international renown in the worlds of tattooing and fine art.

Turner, named for one of Hardy's heroes, the painter J.M.W. Turner, "is based on a thumbnail sketch I did of an ancient sculptural detail in India four years ago," he explained by email earlier this year. "I had never used a contrapposto pose in any of the hundreds of tigers I’ve done over the years in various mediums. The flaming pearl represents wisdom and truth in Buddhist tradition."

Don Ed Hardy - Cosmo, 2014
woodcut with acrylic. Image: 37 x 27 in. Paper: 44 x 30 in. Edition of 33
The dragon, Cosmo, is named "for a very exuberant puppy who we got recently; as I was completing the piece, I realized the image exuded the manic energy and excitement of the dog." While the dragon is painted in a more traditionally Japanese style, he writes, "the rocks surrounding the tiger are based on Korean folk art paintings and serve to balance the circular vortex energy in the waves around the dragon. Likewise, I wanted a different, 'calmer' color scheme around the tiger: flatter, quieter."

Hardy painted the designs for Cosmo and Turner using black sumi ink; his paintings were transferred to a wood block matrix by a combination of laser and hand cutting and printed in black relief ink on an etching press. Hardy's hand-painted acrylic washes were then scanned, registered, and printed in UV-cured acrylic ink under the artist's supervision. Cosmo and Turner were printed by Nicholas Price and Tallulah Terryll at Magnolia Editions in Oakland, California in an edition of 33.

While their symbolism runs deep, the immediate, appealing energy of these prints is more physical than cerebral: their intensity is easily felt, regardless of one's knowledge of Eastern traditions. Hardy's compositions seek the essence of heaven and earth, and as Shakespeare says in Hamlet, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy."

Review: Chuck Close at Guild Hall

Installation view of watercolor prints by Chuck Close, printed and published by Magnolia Editions. Photo by Gary Mamay
Artist and writer Mike Solomon offers a considered and appreciative assessment of Chuck Close's current exhibition at Guild Hall in his review for Hamptons Art Hub.

Solomon singles out the watercolor prints created at Magnolia Editions for special attention, writing:

Other works in the east gallery at Guild Hall show how Close has confronted the newest of media challenges, digital printing, which has since its inception revolutionized the art world. His archival watercolor pigment prints — large portraits of Cindy, 2012, Kiki, 2012, Cecily, 2012, and Zhang I, 2012 — are among the most sumptuous of his works I have ever seen.

Playing with the techniques of watercolor, in which tonalities are made when light penetrates the medium and then reflects back to the eye, carrying with it the color and tone the medium has bestowed, Close brings to bear in these absolutely gorgeous works all the associations a viewer might have about watercolors. There are echoes here of Cezanne, Turner, Homer and Klee.

Through the computer, he is able to assign tinted values in each square of the grid and, I suspect, to print these “washes” in layers, through multiple passes, to arrive at the tones he wants. Through this technology, he achieves the same effects earlier artists developed manually, with a brush.

The use of the digital domain to reinvent watercolor is the kind of thing many in the art world hoped for when the digital revolution started, but there have been too few examples of this kind of innovation. These works certainly change all that. I suspect an entirely new genre of watercolor painting will be derived from them. They are that important.

Notice the size of the grid, too, as its variation determines the kind of focus the viewer experiences of the image. In Cindy, 2012, the grid size is about one and half inches, so the abstraction of the work dominates until the viewer moves back quite a distance from the surface. Cecily, 2012, has an even larger grid of about two inches, so the “immediate splendor” (Alfonso Ossorio’s wonderful phrase) is what the viewer gets from its abstraction until moving to the opposite side of the gallery. Then the representation finally comes into focus. In Kiki, 2012 and Zhang I, 2012, the grid is smaller, about three quarters of an inch. In these two, the images are tighter and the focus moves closer to the surface of the work.

This choice of grid size is another one of those areas that Close plays with, and it begs, along with the beauty of the watercolor tints, the kind of contemplation that keeps one involved in the work.

To read the full review, please visit the Hamptons Art Hub website.

Tapestries by Chuck Close, published by Magnolia Editions, at Guild Hall. Photo by Gary Mamay
For more details on the show and associated events, please see this entry; for information on visiting Guild Hall, please check their website.

More art by Chuck Close from Magnolia Editions