| Robert Kipniss | ||
| Birth Date: February 1, 1931 |
||
Artist Gallery |
||
| Robert Kipniss was born in New York City in 1931. He studied at the Art Students League, Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio and the University of Iowa.
He creates monochromatic mezzotint stylized vistas with natural and architectural elements intended to evoke a nearly surrealistic mood in haunting, silent landscapes. Trees, in mid and far-distance, form clusters or act as misty individuals containing a haunted, indefinable presence, witnesses to the foreground drama of more specific shapes. Light and darkness are clearly Kipniss’ compositional elements. They also exist as contestants in the emotional drama at the heart of each work. The contrast between these two opposites, symbolically represent with blackness the idea of threat, fear, trouble, evil while whiteness symbolizes safety, redemption, fulfillment and good.
The classic mezzotint process, invented in the middle of the 17th Century, is the reverse of most of the other print-making media. The artist works from a black ground to increasingly light areas. The copper plate is first roughened by a “rocker” creating a burr over the entire surface (the more burr left intact, the more ink it holds, the darker the final finished print). Kipniss, in this instance, gradually burnishes, smoothes down the burr in varying degrees to produce the gradations of lights and darks of the final design. The deepest dark in the final picture are those areas on the plate that have been little touched after the roughening.
|
||