Wednesday, April 03, 2019

NPM 2019 Day 3: Hollar's Work

There is an exhibition currently at the VMFA entitled Hollar’s Encyclopedic Eye: Prints from the Frank Raysor Collection. Wenceslaus Hollar was a Baroque printmaker who produced nearly 2500 etchings. When you walk into the exhibition, the first thing you do is pick up a magnifying glass. Upon closer inspection of the prints are these AMAZING hidden worlds. Exploring the images felt a bit like looking at Where's Waldo? pages. There's just so much to see!

I wrote this poem about the etching process and the surprise animal hidden in the title page of a book on flora and fauna.


Hollar's Work
begin with copper plate
  coat with wax
    apply a sharp tool with skill
      and imagination
        bathe in acid
repeat
repeat
repeat

remove remaining wax
  ink and clean
    place dampened paper over plate
press
press
press

mirror image now revealed
  showcase the brilliance of
    the artist’s mind
     and madness

is that a unicorn?

 Poem ©Tricia Stohr-Hunt, 2019. All rights reserved.


Happy Wednesday all. See you tomorrow for another original poem.
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2 comments:

  1. Cheriee Weichel4/03/2019 9:59 PM

    Wow! Your poem shows up how intricate and complicated this art is!

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  2. tanita✿davis4/04/2019 4:58 PM

    Etching is so beautiful because it takes. so. much. I remember doing mini-variations on this with rubbing, as a kid, learning to work with wax and stylus (but never the acid).

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