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Posted by RL Tillman on April 25th, 2009 | 
Prints from a project called Carving the Floors are currently on view at SPACE Gallery in Portland, Maine:
The Old Brunswick High School (in use from 1937-1995), in Brunswick, Maine, will be demolished in May of 2009. In advance of its demolition, Advanced Printmaking students from Bowdoin College, together with Anna Helper and Andrea Sulzer, carved two classroom floors in the high school as gigantic woodcuts. Each floor was printed by hand in sections and then drymounted together to create the final 20×30 foot images.
More documentation at the SPACE538 blog and Anna Hepler’s website.
(Thanks to New England Correspondent Delia Kovac for the info.)
Posted by RL Tillman on April 16th, 2009 | It’s time for R.L.’s BELIEVE ME OR NOT!! The Guinness Book of World Records lists three printmaking categories on its website.
There are two separate categories for Giant Relief Prints. The Largest Woodblock Print was created in 2004 by 334 German children, under the auspices of a marketing firm called Richarz Kommunikation. It had a total area of 3,720 square feet, which is only about eleven square feet per child, so it’s not that impressive.
The Longest Woodblock Print was the 2007 MFA thesis of Christopher Brady. This print measured in just shy of 282 feet. Apparently that was big enough to secure Chris a spot on the “Immense Prints” panel at CAA last year, so not too shabby! Still, if you’re looking to make a name for yourself, there may be room for improvement.
On the other hand, it seems unlikely that you’ll ever top The Largest Single Printed Lithograph. Mario Derra constructed his matrix inside a quarry in Germany in 2008.
This record may never be beaten, unless some Bavarian supervillain decides to rent out his quarry headquarters.
Posted by Jason Urban on November 3rd, 2008 | Baltimore-based artist Gary Kachadourian currently has a solo exhibition titled “Life-Sized Prints and Assorted Drawing Projects” at the Gormley Gallery at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland. The show features images xeroxed to a 1:1 scale with real life. The print subjects include a light pole, a Volvo, and, if you can believe it, a McDonald’s restaurant! These are massive…
Gary worked with MBC Precision Imaging to create the large-scale prints using an Oce 9800 Scanner/Printer…
The prints are all from 8.5″x11″ drawings that are scanned at 1200dpi and then converted to life size. The files that are used for the prints are TIFF BITMAPS at 200dpi. The largest sections are 170″x36″, trimmed and taped together.
A few more pics after the jump…
Continue reading Gary Kachadourian: Life-Sized Prints
Posted by Jason Urban on October 11th, 2008 |  Sandow Birk, Invasion, Woodcut, 48″x96″, 2007.
In 2006, HuiPress of Hawaii worked with Los Angeles-based artist Sandow Birk to create his Depravities of War series. The project consists of 15 large-scale woodcuts (48″x96″) based on 17th century French artist Jacques Callot’s etching series, “The Miseries and Misfortunes of War.” The contextualization of current events through the lens of of art history is one of Birk’s common themes.
From a 2007 LA Times article by Sharon Mizota:
The images in “Depravities” often quote Callot directly, cloaking his compositions in the trappings of present-day Iraq and the U.S. “If he had a picture of a street with a tree on the right, then I would do a street with a tree on the right,” Birk says. For reference, he amassed a thick folder of war images from newspapers and websites. “If I needed a house, I would find a photo of an actual house in Baghdad and try to use that.”
 Sandow Birk, Destruction, Woodcut, 48″x96″, 2007.
And a low-res version of the corresponding Callot…
 Jacques Callot, The Destruction of a Monastery, Etching, 3″x6″?, 1633.
The original Callot etchings are actually quite small- interestingly, Birk’s original drawings for the monumental woodcuts were drawn at a similar scale as the Callots and then photo-mechanically enlarged, transferred to the blocks and carved.
Posted by amze on July 1st, 2008 |
Beijing is a world-class boomtown, throwing up new buildings at a staggering pace. While traveling around the city observing all this raging architectural growth one can’t help but be intrigued by the way a kind of urban camouflage is being employed to hide all the activity.
As you can see in these pictures, large format photographic/digital images are printed onto an all-weather material and wrapped around the construction sites. These wrap-around prints often operate as a kind of large scale Trompe-l’œil piece, portraying the site prior to the demolition.
In other cases they depict what the site will look like following completion of the construction. This is more in line with the billboards you often see in western cities at the site of new development.
One could speculate that this practice is intended to soften the psychological blow of the lost architectural and personal history. Or perhaps it’s just a pragmatic means to hide an eyesore. Whatever the case, this practice creates strange moments of dissonance and make one wonder what other ways this technology might be employed.
Posted by Jason Urban on May 13th, 2008 |  
Has anyone else noticed the similarities between the large-scale figurative woodcuts of Leonard Baskin and many of today’s most popular street artists? Swoon, Gaia, and Elbow-Toe are just a few of the artists using antiquated print media to disseminate their imagery across the metropolitan landscape. And that imagery is strongly reminiscent of Baskin’s monumental prints (pictured above Baskin’s Hanged Man & one of Swoon’s paste-ups).
Continue reading Leonard Baskin: Foreshadowing a Street Aesthetic
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