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Richard Wagener ~ California |
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| Mixolydian Editions is work illustrated by Wagener with text by Wagener | |
| The Sierra Nevada Suite Thirty-One Wood Engravings By Richard Wagener San Francisco, California: Book Club of California, 2013. Edition of 308 with ten artist's proofs. 7.5 x 13"; 9 sets of two folded 15 x 13" sheets. Laid in paper wrapper with wood engraving on front cover. Artist's proof copy with additional suite of four prints. Presented in cloth- covered clamshell box with recess for portfolio of additional prints. Signed and numbered on the colophon by the artist. Each of the four extra prints signed and numbered as well. Colophon: "The Sierra Nevada Suite was designed and produced in an edition of three hundred and eight numbered copies by Peter Koch with the assistance of Jonathan Gerken for The Book Club of California. Ten artist's proofs designated A/P and ten printers proofs designated P/P are reserved. The woodengravings were printed by Richard Wagener. The typeface, Dante, designed by Giovanni Mardersteig, was originally hand-cut by Charles Malin and adapted for mechanical composition by Monotype in 1957. The text was cast at the letterfoundry of Michael & Winifred Bixler and printed by Max Koch on Zerkall Büttenpapier. Book binding and slipcases by John DeMerritt Bookbinding. Each book is numbered and signed by the artist." Prospectus: "The 31 blocks, including two panorama fold out prints, in this special edition were hand-engraved on end-grain boxwood and relief-printed by Richard Wagener. The majority have been produced between 2010 and 2013. The present work is a companion volume to California in Relief, published by the Book Club in 2009 to wide acclaim, and continues a legacy of ingenuity and beauty. Book Club of California: "Richard Wagener is unsurpassed in the world of contemporary wood-engraving. This book contains new prints inspired by views that moved Wagener while hiking in the Sierra Nevada." Peter Koch, Introduction: "John Muir reminds us that a life lived without great rocky outcrops and ageless trees as a part of one’s native landscape would be a life deprived of one of the greatest resources of the sublime.… In the Sierra Nevada there live trees as old as Sumerian phonographic script and Egypt’s Bronze Age Middle Kingdom – there for you to lean against and smell … alive … sap oozing from the cores of the oldest living friends we have. Richard Wagener’s engravings capture an essential quality of that friendship –nearness and an austere clarity." $1800 Artist's Proof Copy (Last Copy) |
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| Mountains & Religions Wood engravings and book design by Richard Wagener Text by Peter Matthiesen, Alexandria David-Neel, and Jeremy Bernstein Petaluma, California: Mixolydian Editions, 2011. Edition of 40. 7 x 11.25 x .5"; 32 leaves. Letterpress printed with Monotype Bembo. Printed on handmade Yamagampi paper. Bound using handmade Lokta paper from Nepal over light boards. Laid in a wrap-around of Japanese silk Genji cloth and Kyoseishi paper. Mountains & Religion, a collection of twenty wood engravings, is based upon a journey to Nepal and Tibet in the autumn of 1995. The images are from the Kathmandu valley, up the Kali Gandaki valley on the Annapurna region of Nepal, then to Lhasa, Shigatse, and the countryside of Tibet. This visual documentation contains the expected mountain vistas, but just as compelling is the architecture of the human spirit - the monasteries, the temples, the public squares. Wagener's choice of slightly cream-colored, velvety paper is an effective for the deep blacks and subtle gradations of tone in his engravings. The supple cloth-like pages are in marked contrast to the solidity of the scenes, but the combination seems apt for a collection titled Mountains & Religions. The engravings are accompanied by excerpts from The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiesen, My Journey to Lhasa by Alexandra David-Neel, and In the Himalayas by Jeremy Bernstein. $1,450 |
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Cracked Sidewalks In the edition of 65, Numbers 1-25 are deluxe copies printed on Twinrocker handmade paper and bound in quarter leather and cloth over boards. Numbers 26-65 are regular copies printed on Rives Heavyweight paper and bound with quarter cloth and paper-covered boards. 5.5 x 10"; 72 pages. Letterpress printed. Composed and cast in Monotype Dante. Illustrated with four full-page wood engravings and one vignette title-page illustration by the author. Printed on Rives Heavyweight paper. Quarter tan linen over charcoal gray paper-covered boards. Mounted paper title label on spine. Title-page illustration blind stamped on front cover. Cracked Sidewalks begins: "Each autumn collected more reasons to leave behind that which stays with you, the marks of a time shared with people and ideas that bring definition to one's sensibility. The measure of change is more certain during journeys back to those determinate places." This series of short impressionistic prose vignettes present "journeys back to those determinate places" for a young man who came of age in post-WWII Los Angeles. |
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California in Relief 7.75 x 12.5"; 88 pages. Letterpress printed by Peter Koch. Engravings printed by Richard Wagener. Signed and numbered by the artist. Laid in paper wrapper with engraving on front cover. Additional portfolio of four engravings laid in brown paper wrapper. Engravings signed and numbered by the artist. Housed in custom cloth and leather clamshell box with paper title label on the spine. This is the one of five printer's proofs as a deluxe edition. Peter Koch, Printer: "Working in the demanding medium of wood engraving, artist Richard Wagener has created a visual itinerary of his wanderings throughout California in his brilliant new work, California in Relief. "Composed of thirty original prints and Wagener's short prose pieces describing them, California in Relief begins and ends in Los Angeles, with stops in the San Jacinto Mountains, the Antelope Valley, Sonoma County, and the Sierra Nevada. Like John Muir and Gary Snyder, Richard Wagener is a wanderer, explorer, and observer of California, creating a poetry of place through both words and images, all born of actual experience. "Not since Paul Landacre mastered the aesthetic and technical challenges of wood engraving in the early twentieth-century has any California artist achieved prominence in the medium until Richard Wagener began to explore it in the 1980s. His previously published illustrated books have won wide acclaim for their ingenuity and beauty, and The Book Club of California is pleased to be the publisher of this magnificent work. Wagener's images of nature - his stately Sierra trees, stark peaks, and rocky crags - and his urban architectural monuments - the Pantages Theater and the Griffith Observatory - combine to make this work a deeply personal record of distinctive California locations. Wagener's technical skill is such that the images shimmer, jewel-like, concise renditions in black and white of sunlight and shadow, landscape and sky." Parenthesis 29, review by Jan Elsted: "Wagener's images have a depth of beauty that arises from long and profound association: they have lived in his mind's eye for a lifetime. However, as personal and particular as the engravings are, this is not only a book about the Californian landscape; it is about the shape of permanence, the quality of stillness, and the interplay of light and shadow in the forms that surround us, both natural and man-made. Remarkably, in the contemplation of a rock formation, shaded in greys, black, and white, or of a solitary tree throwing twisting branches into the sky, we see the energy within those shapes, contained but still vital, and potential; we see the way light and shadow define the real. ... Wagener's essential engravings of an outer landscape remind us of the echo within ourselves of an interior one, and we respond with grateful recognition." |
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Page last update: 09.16.13
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