"The Brilliant Line", Following the Early Modern Engraver - Andrew Raftery, RISD Museum of Art

Madonna with the Pear, Albrecht Durer, Engraving, 1511, RISD.

"Engravings are objects of exquisite beauty and incomparable intricacy whose visual language is composed entirely of lines...Andrew Raftery, an accomplished engraver and Associate Professor of Printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design, analyzed how Early Modern engravers worked within established line systems and also diverged from them." - source: http://risdmuseum.org/thebrilliantline/

A Webby Award nominee for Best Art Website and highly interactive, the visitor can selectively view different stages of the process, from first ideas to final statements, to better understand the printmakers' art and craft.

Link The Brilliant Line, RISD Museum of Art, online exhibit, Andrew Raftery

Kathe Kollwitz - Artist

Self Portrait, Kathe Kollwitz, Color Stone Lithograph,

20.5 x 15 inches, approximately

"I would like to exert an influence in these times when human beings are so perplexed and in need of help." - Kathe Kollwitz, 1922

Käthe Kollwitz, July 8, 1867 – April 22, 1945, was a German painter, printmaker, and sculptor whose work offered an eloquent and often searing account of the human condition in the first half of the 20th century. Her empathy for the less fortunate, expressed most famously through the graphic means of drawing, etching, lithography, and woodcut, embraced the victims of poverty, hunger, and war. Initially her work was grounded in Naturalism, and later took on Expressionistic qualities...

...In 1933, after the establishment of the National-Socialist regime, the Nazi Party authorities forced her to resign her place on the faculty of the Akademie der Künste. Her work was removed from museums. Although she was banned from exhibiting, some of her work was used by the Nazis for propaganda... Wikipedia

Link Wikipedia, Full Text

Link Kathe Kollwitz, Google Image Search

Rembrandt, The Three Crosses, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

The Three Crosses, Rembrandt, 1653, Third State

"Rembrandt's greatest and most dramatic print is the Three Crosses, a work which has all the power of a painting. It shows the deepest point of Christ's suffering: the moment of his death on the cross at Golgotha. Massive beams of light slice through the darkness that the Gospels relate descended on the entire country. The light focuses on Christ, the two murderers who were crucified beside him and the crowd round about. Rembrandt made several versions of this print. This is an impression of the third state."

Link Comments and Analysis, Rijksmuseum