Skip to main content

PRINTMAKING - Käthe Kollwitz

Käthe Kollwitz ( 1867 - 1945) was a German Artist who worked mainly with painting, printmaking and sculpture. Her most famous works depicted the effects of poverty, hunger and war on the working class.



I came across a woodcut self portrait that i liked.
Frontal Self-Portrait (Selbstbildnis von vorn)-1922

I firstly love the black and white contrast of this. I like how it is isolating her face. Her face looks so serious. tired and unhappy. Then i came across a series of woodcuts called Krieg ( war) in 1919. These were response to the aftermath of World War 1. The Woodcuts focus on the mothers, widows and children left behind. 


The Sacrifice (Das Opfer) (plate 1) from War (Krieg)

The Volunteers (Die Freiwilligen) (plate 2) from War (Krieg)

The Parents (Die Eltern) (plate 3) from War (Krieg). (1921-22, published 1923)



The Widow I (Die Witwe I) (plate 4) from War (Krieg)



The Widow II (Die Witwe II) (plate 5) from War (Krieg)

(1922, published 1923)



The Mothers (Die Mütter) (plate 6) from War (Krieg)

The People (Das Volk) (plate 7) from War (Krieg)


These prints are haunting and i found really hard to process them. The huge black and white contrast makes me really feel the greif and fear.


This one print stood out to me the most...

Die Freiwilligen (The volunteers)
This print  is very different because it shows men being led forward by what i think could be death. It is very symbolic and it gives me mixed emotions about the idea or concept of honor and the true sacrifices of it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Art & Design project HNC

Art & Design project HNC This year for project i wanted to work with moving image again but try and really push myself. i dont want to ignore the fact that i have done research before, i want this to seem like i am pushing forwards from what i have done before. Here are blog posts i have done in the past that i am going to use as a foundation to build upon. https://catrinaannbarquist.blogspot.com/2017/01/for-my-new-unit-i-have-decided-to-look.html https://catrinaannbarquist.blogspot.com/2017/03/specialist-techniques-film-part-1_15.html https://catrinaannbarquist.blogspot.com/2017/05/specialist-techniques-looking-at-more.html https://catrinaannbarquist.blogspot.com/2017/05/green-screen.html https://catrinaannbarquist.blogspot.com/2018/06/art-project-evaluation.html Tony Oursler  is an American multimedia and installation artist. I looked at his work last year. I really liked his work, I love the first two and the use of 3D mapping for the p...
Post a Comment
Read more

Starting experimenting with photography

After looking into the work of Henry Weston i decided to try and experiment,first, with negative space. It was something that stood out to me a lot in some of his work, as i spoke about in my report. i started by just taking a few pictures as i noticed it around me. I think these are a very interesting start and have a lot of potential, i decided to play around with the editing a bit by cropping them, changing the contrast and making them black and white.  i like this image and i think composition wise it works. i also think it looks good in black and white as it has gotten rid of the chance of clashing colours and sets a different kind of mood. The subject is in focus and it looks quite sharp. I cropped it a little and changed the contrast and exposure.  i prefer this image to the top one as i like the spacing between the feet compared to the first one i think it is more visually pleasing, i also rotated this image just as an experiment. ...
3 comments
Read more

Experimenting with photography - identity

I started off this series of experiments by thinking about myself, how i see myself and how i choose to be seen, how do i identify myself? I started thinking this when i was doing my report on Art Wolfe, looking at his human canvas photographs i wanted to do something with body painting, and i am working on that. But i wanted to try out digital editing first, i enjoy this kind of art and wanted to experiment with it. I started by taking a picture of myself, nothing fancy just me in front of a white background. I have always thought about myself as someone who struggles with identity, in some ways i feel like i stand out but in other ways i feel like i can blend into a background or a crowd when i want too. i kept this thought going by blurring out my face in the photograph. I then decided to change the face and background white to match each other, i liked the way this image looked and felt like it expressed my feelings of no identity. but not strong enough about hiding...
1 comment
Read more