I'm the curator of FROMTHEMARGINS Art Gallery. HERMAN ZAAGE (1927-2008) is the initial exhibition introducing this venue. Zaage, a well-known fine arts printmaker, esteemed teacher, and active environmentalist was born in Jersey City, New Jersey in 1927. During the 1940s, Zaage attended Work Progress
Administration Art Workshops and in the
early 1960s, studied fine art printmaking with John Ross at the New School, where he later became a popular printmaking teacher. From 1952 to 1982 he worked in the commercial printing trade as a photoengraver and offset color dot etcher. In 1976, he helped found the Art Lab, an artist-run school where he taught for the last 32 years.
Although Zaage worked in etching and woodcut, he became famous for his mezzotints, His work can be found in "Mezzotints: History and Techniques" by Carol Wax.The mezzotint is unequaled in its flair for rendering deep blacks, brilliant highlights, and rich surface qualities. His prints are in the collections of the Staten Island Museum, the Noble Maritime Collection, the Museum of the City of New York, the Portland Art Museum, Oregon, the Purdue University Gallery, the University of Arizon Art Museum.
Mezzotint is among the most physically demanding mediums in art. A copper plate is "rocked" with a curved, notched blade until the surface is entirely pitted. At this stage, an inked plate would print a rich, uniform black. The artist then uses a scraper or burnisher to flatten the raised parts, a little for dark grays, a lot for light grays, completely for white (after inking and wiping, the plate holds no ink where it is smooth). Colors are achieved by similarly working one or more supplementary plates. The result of this process is an image emerging from pitch black. Outlines are simplified by the absence of line, while substance is rendered with a virtually infinite range of tonal subtlety.