Prints have long occupied a special place in the art scene of our region, so a printmaking exhibition at Newcastle Art Gallery immediately suggests either a touring show from the Print Council, recent work by local printmakers or a selection from the wide-ranging and seldom seen prints from the gallery's collection.
In the event, Stopping Time is something quite different.
It considers the very origins of making multiple images. It considers this process from four or five millennia ago, works its way through illustrations for early printed books to a flowering of artist prints and copies of paintings from the Renaissance onward. It then takes us through illustrations for newspapers and other developments in the 19th century.
The final element is a selection of innovative contemporary printmaking techniques.
Curator Ross Woodrow, who many will remember from his stimulating presence at the university art school here, has been able to call on the resources of a number of collections. Particularly significant for the oldest examples are private collectors, though maybe all the extraordinary objects on view come from the collection of a single passionate individual.
Other works come from the collection of Griffith University in Brisbane where Ross Woodrow is now Professor of Fine Art at Queensland College of Art, while the artists supplying innovative contemporary prints direct from their studios, plus many texts for the catalogue, all have postgraduate links to that institution.
The fourth source of work is our Newcastle collection and it is rewarding to suddenly find a group of familiar vestigial landscape etchings by Fred Williams or John Brack's truculent little daughter.
There are many surprises in the hanging. They serve to keep us alert and insist that this is about the physical properties of the prints, as much as a lesson in art history.
If a chronological framework had been intended, photography would have dominated, at least for the last century. This is the elephant in the room and readily acknowledged, but there is a group of portrait daguerreotypes with their solemn sitters enshrined in tooled leather and red velvet.
Many of the earliest prints arise as a practical means of making multiple copies.
The Mesopotamian cylinder seals dating from 3000 BCE onwards must have been rolled and pressed on to the clay of storage vessels or as signatures on cuneiform tablets. Carved from semi-precious stones, they must always have been status objects, while the scenes they depict suggest wealth and ritual, like the signet rings that came later.
We jump centuries to the medieval biblical woodcuts and an explosion of printmaking once paper and the printing process became readily available.
Both etching on metal plates and woodcut achieved virtuosic degrees of detail.
Lesser artists made fine copies of such masters as Drer and Rubens. By the 19th century, pictorial engravings were possible, if labour-intensive, for newspapers.
Only in our own times are artists experimenting with new techniques for purely aesthetic reasons.
We see Tim Mosely creating prints from paper pulp and Ali Bezer making a richly allusive rubbing of a door.
There are hours to be spent exploring centuries of mostly tiny works. This can be seen as a sort of history of taste, with subjects from the bible and classical myth giving way to arcadian scenes of bucolic life for Europeans, while for the Japanese, their celebrated coloured woodblocks from the 18th and 19th centuries depict urban pleasures, particularly the elaborate costumes of courtesans.
The human image predominates and engenders corporal recognition and an emotional bond across the ages, as the ambitious title for the exhibition Stopping Time intends.
Adam and Eve with apple appear in several works, a rare chance for early artists to combine a moral message with an excursion into nudity.
Allegory links the Renaissance to Mike Parr. Jacques Callot's tree (1633) bears fruit as strange as Ernst Haeckel's fantastic life forms of 1900.
Baroque personifications of Asia and Africa, with their opulent rhetoric, make curious comparison with William Blake's workaday indigenous Australians.
On view this weekend at Art Systems Wickham are prints by long-term teacher and mentor Francis Celtlan (1936-2017).
Known principally as a painter, his linocuts demonstrate an instinctive balance of black and white. Grab a quick life drawing for $10.
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