Writings
There is a compelling attraction to the graphic qualities of cultivated fields—of roadways, railroad tracks, and rows of crops converging at a distant focal point on the horizon. Driving cross-country, the infinite rows of repeating corn draw the eye and imprint themselves in our neural cortex with a permanence that seems destined to last longer than our very flesh and bone.
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There is something of the beehive or perhaps the anthill about ancient cities – houses attached to one another, forming organic lines and irregular alleyways with mysterious openings at irregular intervals.
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There is a compelling attraction to the graphic qualities of cultivated fields—of roadways, railroad tracks, and rows of crops converging at a distant focal point on the horizon. Driving cross-country, the infinite rows of repeating corn draw the eye and imprint themselves in our neural cortex with a permanence that seems destined to last longer than our very flesh and bone.
Esoteric traditions speak of an Akashic Record in which all things are recorded and accessible to those who’ve earned the right of entry. Here you see a fanciful entry in that book of records, opened to the page of decomposers and pollinators.
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One place with two names - both of which I have provided with label designs since 1984. The story of Bell’s Beer is a good one and I was there from the very beginning, so come with me and find out how Bell’s Brewery began and grew from just a dream to a major American institution over the course of a mere thirty years.
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In 1986, I lived for a year in Prague, before the Velvet Revolution and preceding the current expatriate community of Westerners. Perhaps the only American resident without a diplomatic passport, I lived separately from people raising families and going to work. I was not a foreign tourist either, but an artist of Czech parentage, extending my visa thirty days at a time and making the required exchanges of dollars to stay legal.
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Etchings of Native American Marker Trees
(27 pages)
The Land of the Crooked Tree lies due north. Short growing seasons, long winters and deep snow, characterize this land where there is little room for error and "tales told, that'll make your blood run cold."
Paperback copies are available for $25.00 plus shipping. Visit my contact page to order yours today.
There was a bullet with my name on it in Viet Nam. I knew it.
I began to receive this distinct warning signal with increasing frequency and urgency. I was in my first year of college, at the tail end of that undeclared but honest to God shooting war. The hostilities in Nam were tearing our country apart, and tearing me up as well. I was draft-age. The sixth sense that had saved my life before, and which I had learned to take seriously, was commandeering my attention full time. I needed to think clearly. By day, my inborn sense of self-preservation and my youthful idealism righteously rebelled at going to meet that destiny. But, by night, the bewildering morality of letting some other man take my bullet tormented me. I needed time alone.
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Looking Back Upon ArtPrize
It is done and the show taken down. The space is clean and no evidence remains of the effort invested. I met some fine new people and reconnected with hundreds of friends and collectors who came to see me and my wall of bees.
This guide contains thoughts on all manner of things pertinent to printmaking – from editions & print publishers to Contract Printers - all the odd & obscure shop talk & confabulations having to do with our peculiar practice of the ‘“Black Arts”.
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I am an artist and keeper of bees — two venerable vocations whose roots extend back to the Neolithic Age and into a time when the roles of artist and shaman were essentially interchangeable. The several etchings you see here, encrusted with amber-hued beeswax, are made in the time-honoured way, much as Rembrandt recorded the Dutch landscape on copper plates in the 17th century. They are made by hand and rely upon extensive fieldwork before being completed in studio. These works often take on a second life, when I insert them into a living beehive, where bees take over and continue the now collaborative creative process.
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A Foray with Field Glasses and Sketchbook
(143 pages)
One hundred ninety drawings and etchings by Ladislav Hanka – accompanied by essays throughout.
Paperback copies are available for $25.00 plus shipping. Visit my contact page to order yours today.
I first encountered John Voelker between the covers of Trout Madness (writing under the pen name of Robert Traver). This beautiful collection of fishing stories from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula appeared under the Christmas tree when I was eight—admittedly as my father’s present, but one which I quickly appropriated. Sensing the potency of the proffered vision and desirous of making it my own, I snuck off with my new Christmas paint box and father’s book to plagiarize the leaping Brook Trout on its dust jacket.
Art is a form of contemplative prayer, best conducted in places quiet enough to allow the subtle voices to be heard—beyond the din of market and social diversions. Perched on a windy cliff with a sketchbook on my knees and contemplating the graphic conundrums posed by a rocky archipelago, I find myself resolving the receding and overlapping lines of more complex and meaningful perspectives as well.
Testament of Ladislav R. Hanka on Life as a Breatharian/Pranarian/Inediate (June 13, 2019).
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The Intimate Embrace of Process and Aesthetics
Etching is a technical medium about which even knowledgeable collectors and curators often know surprisingly little. This medium, however, affects my imagery and my approach as surely as water flows downhill. Therefore, to help you understand the process, this chapter will welcome you into my world as an insider; I will offer you no secrets, no esoteric mumbo jumbo, but instead a process that is eminently comprehensible.
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My father is an astute and talented liqueur and mead-maker, and I have created quite a few labels for his hobby. I have also followed in his footsteps, refining his recipes and crafting many of my own. Dr. Ladislav J. Haňka, now a retiree, spent decades as a microbiologist and biochemist at The Upjohn Company in Kalamazoo, conducting basic research in the development of new pharmaceuticals. He specialized in exploring the natural world, focusing on soil fungi and other sources that might produce highly complex biochemical compounds with medicinal potential.
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This magnificent Bur Oak grows in a prairie opening of Southwest Michigan which has today become a suburb of Kalamazoo. This original portaging place from the St Joseph to the Kalamazoo River watersheds conferred a meaningful place-name to Portage. Until recently the landscape was agricultural and dotted with large Victorian farmhouses speaking of successful farmers tilling the deep prairie soils, but now it is a place that grows tract housing and mini-malls.
Inflorescences of Decay
Mushrooms are flowers of the dark - beautiful aromatic gifts from the mysterious, decomposing side of the life cycle. These fungal decomposers also generate many of the most biologically active substances in nature and therein lies part of their fascination too.
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My Thoughts on Fishing and What I Gain From It
Mesmerized by the cyclical homecoming of salmon, I will, at times, wade right in among them and swim with these living symbols of home and return, brushing up against the spawning salmon, captivated by that ultimate biological imperative, driven by the need to return. Many fish return home, overcoming great obstacles in order to spawn in the streams of their birth, to then simply die and be washed into logjams and complete the cycle. Dust to dust, silt to silt. It is a drama that has me hooked.
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Who are those interesting characters on the Stout labels & what have I missed by not knowing about the Rex Cafe? Well, it has its ups and downs - But here’s the story: The models for these portraits were various alcoholics and street people from about 1981–1984, most of whom I haven’t seen in a long time and presume to be dead. Several are actually friends cast in the roles of that sort of person—‘there but for the grace of God.’
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Thoughts on all manner of things pertinent to printmaking – from editions & print publishers to Contract Printers - all the odd & obscure shop talk & confabulations having to do with our peculiar practice of the ‘’Black Arts’.
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Bob was the first investor in the brewery (other than Larry Bell, his-self ) and was often to be seen back in the shop - on his back, taking motor oil dribblings in the face as he resuscitated the used and abused equipment which the brewery could afford in its early days. He was a preternaturally talented fixer-upper guy who could touch most anything and make it run – good skills for a camp ranger. In his off days he kept stuff running which should long ago have been in the clutches of the scrap metal recyclers.
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Thirty Years of Collaboration in the Book Arts
Jan Sobota died on May 2, 2012. He was my friend and collaborator for nearly three decades, but more importantly, he was a significant participant in the renaissance of American Book Arts that took place in the 1980s and 1990s. This movement eventually led to the establishment of the book arts as a recognized discipline taught in university art departments and granted standing as an art form in museums.
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This article was first published on August 17, 2009, on www.conversations.org/
I have read your book Art and Fear and have been moved by the deeply humane truths contained therein—enough so to reflect after thirty years as a printmaker, how it is that I survived into middle age as an artist, while nearly all of my colleagues from US art schools have not. What makes this situation all the more vexing, is that I attended art academy in Europe as well and nearly all of those colleagues still make art. Why the difference? What can we learn from that dichotomy?
Amphibians are to the world today as the caged canary was once to the coal miner. They depend upon healthy surface waters; they are dying, and we should be concerned. As a naturalist, I hadn’t noticed the paucity of toads until I needed some specimens to draw and had difficulty finding any. They had become so uncommon, even in good habitat, that the once-ubiquitous hog-nosed snakes that feed on them had died out.
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On the surface, my work may appear to be all birds, bugs and fish and I myself a sort of idiot - in love with all creation, gone feral embracing the trees and posies. Yet my drawings - the webs of fiercely wrought bones and branches, vulvas of fruit, fragile skeletons and stamens, serpents and luna moths gliding through nocturnal mazes etched into copper - are not just a fool’s scrawls of a sentimentally viewed nature. My ulterior motive, if it can indeed be called that, is to reflect a reality far more complex than anyone’s capacity to delimit, categorize, catalog or define it with a distant and cold-eyed intellectual rigor.
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The tradition of sporting still-lives addresses both the beautiful as well as melancholic aspects of the dead bird in hand. These are mementa mori—reminders of mortality. Though the birds may be elegantly composed and beautiful drawn, they are also reminders that we live and eat at the expense of another.
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This article was first published on March 4, 2013, on www.conversations.org/
The curator of a major US art museum recently declined my work with apologies that their area of concentration is in collecting Contemporary Art. It was an odd slight, filled with unstated assumptions. It is ultimately unclear to me how one actually avoids being contemporary. For one who’s not dead yet, such language sets in motion chains of thought, which have been incubating for decades. I make my living as an artist and address little else but matters that are of my time. Is concern for the planet and its extinctions “so twentieth century“ as to be passé?
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