The Ibis

10/09/2021

Ogata Kenzan : “Autumn Ivy” (after 1732)

Ogata Kenzan was a Japanese painter and potter known for his distinctive style of calligraphy. According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this album leaf "recalls a famous episode from the tenth-century Ise Stories (Ise monogatari) in which the protagonist encounters an itinerant monk along an ivy-strewn path on Mount Utsu." The verse reads: "Though not yet / winds through the pines / blow all around / and I dread they'll scatter / the crimson leaves of ivy."

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A print of this work is available in our store: https://www.theibis.net/product/ogata-kenzan-autumn-ivy-after-1732/

10/08/2021

Hugo Simberg : "The Garden of Death" (1896)

Finnish painter Hugo Simberg portrayed death with warmth and lightheartedness, challenging viewers to revisit their apprehensions about mortality. According to the artist, "The Garden of Death" depicts “the place where the dead end up before going to Heaven.”

The skeletons are helpers who lovingly tend to plants and flowers representing human souls. The Ateneum art museum observes that by representing human souls as plants, Simberg implies that “man is as undeveloped compared to his paradisical self as a child is compared to an adult.”

Simberg produced several variations of "The Garden of Death" using different techniques. This version was executed in watercolor and gouache. Frescos of "The Garden of Death" and another of his great works, "The Wounded Angel," adorn Tampere Cathedral in Tampere, Finland; a Lutheran church designed in the National Romantic style by Lars Sonck and built between 1902 and 1907.

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A print of this work is available in our store: https://www.theibis.net/product/hugo-simberg-the-garden-of-death-1896/

10/07/2021

Theorem stencil was a folk art technique that was taught to women in academies and boarding schools in New England from the colonial period till the mid-1800s. According to Gregory LeFever, “Paints were color pigments mixed with gum tragacanth and water to a creamy consistency, and brushes were of the type itinerant artists used when stenciling walls or furniture. The stencils themselves were sheets of paper coated with linseed oil to promote transparency and then varnished to stiffen and seal the stencil.”

Most theorems were familiar still life subjects, like flowers and fruit. The artist would trace an image (perhaps from a book), break it down into its geometric elements and cut a stencil for each. She would then paint or draw though the stencil onto fabric, paper or wood, recreating the original composition piece-by-piece.

The rarest and most prized theorems are original designs where the artist has applied her own shading, as in this drawing by Mary Altha Nims. In addition to decorative elements like flowers and butterflies, Nims was able to handle landscape, marine and architectural subjects that were well beyond the ken of ordinary theorem artists, employing beautiful gradients with a design sensibility reminiscent of Japanese woodblock prints.

At the height of its popularity (1810-1840), the theorem supplanted embroidery in girls’ school curricula, but it declined as decorative arts and hostess skills gave way to academic studies, and a new craze for tinsel painting took hold. Today, there remain a handful of practitioners dedicated to keeping this artform alive.

Prints of these works are available in our store: https://www.theibis.net/product-tag/mary-altha-nims/

10/07/2021

The pioneering balloonist Albert Tissandier witnessed this lunar halo during his March 1875 flight from Paris to Arcachon. Halos like these appear when the light of the Sun or Moon is refracted through the tiny ice crystals that make up cirrus clouds. They are often visible from Earth, but to experience one while drifting through the night sky, the moonlight shimmering upon the clouds below, must have been transcendental. A month later, he would barely escape death by asphyxiation as he and his (less fortunate) crew achieved a record altitude of 28,000 ft.

A print of this work is available in our store: https://www.theibis.net/product/albert-tissandier-lunar-halo-observed-by-balloon-c-1875-1880/

10/01/2021

A seventeenth-century pamphlet titled “The Mowing-Devil: Or, Strange NEWS out of Hartford-shire” is heralded by some as the first recorded account of the crop circle phenomenon. It takes the form of a morality tale in which a miserly farmer is punished for denying fair wages to a poor mower. The extended title reads:

“Being a True Relation of a Farmer, who Bargaining with a poor Mower, about the Cutting down Three Half Acres of Oats; upon the Mower’s asking too much, the Farmer swore, That the Devil should Mow it, rather than He: And lo it fell out, that that very Night, the Crop of Oats shew’d as if it had been all of a Flame; but next Morning appear’d so neatly Mow’d by the Devil, or some Infernal Spirit, that no Mortal Man was able to do the like.

“Also, How the said Oats ly now in the Field, and the Owner has not Power to fetch them away.”

The pamphlet describes the crops as being cut (not pressed) in a circular pattern, “with the exactness that it would have taken up above an Age, for any Man to perform what he did in that night.”

A print of this work is available in our store: https://www.theibis.net/product/unknown-artist-the-mowing-devil-or-strange-news-out-of-hartford-shire-1678/

10/01/2021

https://www.theibis.net/a-most-rare-compendium/

Compendium Rarissimum is the quintessential black magic grimoire, containing 31 Gothic illustrations of named demons, lesser evil spirits, rituals, tools and sigils. Inscribed in Latin and German, it provides instructions for signing a blood-pact with the Devil, the construction of a magic mirror, a...

08/18/2021

Adolphe Appian : “In the Valromey Valley, near the Rhone River” (1868)

Adolphe Appian was renowned for his charcoals, and the immense In the Valromey Valley shows his mastery of the medium. Traditionally made of charred willow, vine twigs, or other wood, and available from the 1840s as compressed sticks, charcoal was capable of seemingly infinite gradations, of being coloristic without actual color. Appian’s energies helped charcoal attain importance for finished, independent works of art.

The season is autumn, when leaves fall and the sun sits low in the sky. Appian seems to have mirrored this transitional time of year in his handling, softening the edges where land meets sky and achieving an astoundingly subtle range of reflections in the water. His technique involved repeated blackening and removing and an insistent avoidance of contour. The impressionistic trees at the far right were no doubt made with his fingers, the horizontal ripples in the water with a needle, and the limbs of the pollarded willow, lurching as if to s***f out the sun, with a brush and charcoal powder.

Visit our shop to order a print: https://tinyurl.com/4668rhn9

Descriptive text courtesy of the Minneapolis Institute of Art (CC BY 3.0).