Class on Wednesday, March 13th, we had the opportunity to visit the Colby College Museum of Art Special Collections with Professor Plesch. It was an amazing opportunity, and I am thankful we have the privilege to do this.
During our visit to the museum, Professor Plesch taught us about a few techniques and showed us works portraying these techniques. Our class focused on painted-over woodcuts, relief, intaglio, cross-hatching, drypoint needling, and finally etching. We looked at one woodcut: Albrecht Dürer’s Passio Christi and Hendrik Goltzius’s Mucius Scaevola which displayed the cross-hatching technique that ultimately holds a wide range of line-width throughout the work. Mucius Scaevola also held lines portraying complex shapes; not exact straightness, yet the lines held arches and arcs, with varying amounts of space between each line. We looked at Colby College students’ etchings and drypoint needling, where one sketches on varnished metal and then places the metal into an acid bath. We also discussed Jacques Callot’s Dwarf with Big Belly, which showed as an example of a printmaker hoping to depict an engraving. We continued class looking at Rembrandt van Rijn’s The Goldweigher’s Field, a simple-looking etching, Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Vedutta Della Bascilica, E Piazza Di S.Pietro in Vaticano, another etching on paper. Many of these works showed intricate details in the faces of the people. Ultimately these works brought me to modern day cartoons, which show harsh facial expressions through intricate detail and multiple lines.