Jan Mensinga - unique 1980s proof print monochrome lithograph "man with rooster"

• Medium: monochrome lithography on paper
• Dating: 1980s
• Numbered: proof
• Signed: in pencil
• Condition: In very good condition
• Titled: "man with rooster"
• Sheet size: 28 x 33 cm.
  

Jan Roelf Mensinga (1924-1998) was a graphic artist through and through: he drew on an etching plate or a lithographic stone with an ease that other artists only display on paper. He drew the subjects for his prints from his daily life and from literature, showing a preference for the melancholic and surrealist work of writers such as Gogol, Chekhov, Dylan Thomas, and Rimbaud. Based on their stories and poems, Mensinga created bibliophile books on which he worked for years, and even after such a book had been published, he continued to work on the scenes and characters for a long time. The figures in Mensinga's prints are almost always tragic, regardless of their rank or status. Kings go mad, madmen imagine themselves kings. His work is often black, both in content and form. He made his own printing ink because the black from the store was not black enough for him. Like an alchemist, he tried, as a friend puts it in this book, to create 'black fire on white fire'. On a few occasions – for example in the lithograph series The Creation (1985) – he actually brought light lines forth from the darkness.