Prints inspired by art history

I am trying to participate in the #PrinterSolstice again this year. They have created a series of prompts for each of 13 weeks starting with the (northern hemisphere) winter solstice. This year the themes are based on 20th century movements in art. It's been challenging to find time; we're once again sheltering at home and schools have gone remote here. Facilitating remote school takes a lot of my time and I cannot print at the same time, though I can plan, draw and carve. 

We started with Abstract Expressionism, which is really outside my wheelhouse, since my prints are representational. But it gave me a chance to work intuitively to create a mono print with scraps of lino.

monoprint by Ele Willoughby, 2022

Next was Art Deco. I looked at a lot of Art Deco artworks. The frequent clamshell motif and the keyhole shape in Art Nouveau works, plus seeing a number of mermaid illustrations reminded me I had long wanted to illustrate the story of Mélusine, the legendary half-fairy ancestor of the House of Lusignan and royals including the Plantagenets, whose lower half became a serpent when she bathed. She marries a nobleman but insists he must never observe her in the bath; of course he does, and she leaves him - so the keyhole shape works just right to tell the story! There are many versions, like most folklore. Sometimes she has two tails, or a fishtail or wings. There are different versions of her name and various stories are found in different regions especially France, Luxembourg and the Low Countries. I first learned of her from Manuel Mujica Láinez’s The Wandering Unicorn, which tells her story through the centuries. Her story also appears in A.S. Byatt’s Possession amongst many other places from operas to video games.

Mélusine linocut, 8" x 10" by Ele Willoughby, 2022

These art history prompts have been a challenge to link to my art practice. I've  been seeking a connection to things like science art. The third prompt was Bauhaus. In looking at Bauhaus paintings I was reminded of nothing so much as Feynman diagrams, and the exuberance action on the quantum scale, so I decided to combine quantum physics with the Bauhaus vocabulary of lines, shapes and colour palette. 

I was thinking more of the paintings of Kandinsky than the regular geometric shapes in Bauhaus design: a welter of black straight, wavy and curly lines, stripes of colour, triangles, circles and concentric rings and washes of pale colour, often on a cream coloured background. 

The Feynman diagrams are a tool of particle and quantum physics to both denote a particle interaction and also can be used to make calculations of probabilities and physical properties. Straight lines denote particles (quarks and leptons like electrons). Wavy lines denote photons. Curly lines are gluons and the dotted line is a Higgs particle. I wanted to include an electron spontaneously giving off a virtual photo and particle-antiparticle pairs, production of a Higgs particle, one diagram of the sort of we see if we smash protons together, and one hilariously named penguin diagram (in this instance producing a gluon).

Feynman Diagram Bauhaus, linocut, variable edition, 8" x 10" by Ele Willoughby, 2022

Looking at all these prints as I try to plan ahead and link them to my art practice and science art I am reminded of Leonard Shlain's book Art and Physics. It should be around here somewhere but I can't find it on my bookshelves. (Aside: this house needs a librarian.) In the book Schlain linked major movements in art with advancements in physics. I am not sure I can agree with his thesis that movements in art presaged new physics (which feels like it violates causality to me) but I greatly enjoyed the book. Others have drawn parallels between art and physics and it's clear that both math and physics were an influence of some of these major modern movements in art. In fact, this has been true for centuries; consider for instance the development of artistic perspective, or the camera obscura. One of the obvious connections is between cubism and the math of the fourth dimension and the physics of relativity. So that is something I'm thinking about for an upcoming print.

Some of the other prompts (colour field, Dadaism, Fauvism, Harlem Renaissance, Minimalism and surrealism) are less obvious for me, but I'm thinking ahead. Op Art is rather clearly related to mathematics. I have a scientific idea for Conceptual art and the seed of an idea for Pop Art. Stay tuned for more!