Thy Grief (2022)
The Judgement: Linoplate
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The Judgement: Finished print
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hy Grief
was born in Russia in 1998.
His copies of Holbein's Great Dance of Death are from 2022 and
thus the supremely newest in this section on Holbein imitators.
Thy Grief reproduces the woodcuts as linoleum cuts,
measuring 210 × 148 mm.
The prints are copies of Holbein's so-called printers' proofs with English headings instead of German.
Some of the motifs, e.g.
the Waggoner,
are not among the proofs, and therefore Thy Grief has had to make do with poorer scans.
The motifs are easy to see in the photos of the plates he posts online, and the raw plates are amost more interesting than the finished prints.
The plates appear clear and distinct because the photos were taken before the first ink had been applied.
The copies are extremely meticulous.
Other copyists, such as
Joseph Schlotthauer,
Vincenzo Valgrisi and
De doodt vermaskert also present close copies, but
in this case, every little line has been copied. I asked Thy Grief
how he copies the scenes, and the answer was:
The printer transfer technique is quite simple. You prepare your digital sketch of your linocut, then print it with any laser-printer, after that you lay the printed sketch face downwards on your plate (so the sketch touches the linoleum). And then you transfer it by clothes iron until the sketch comes off paper and transfers to your plate. After that you remove the paper and welcome to carve!
(Thy Grief. Personal Correspondence)
The scene with Judgment Day was the one that cost the most work:
»The hardest one was definitely The Judgement: a lot of lines, a lot of tiny details, a lot of work :)«.
I only present a selection here but the full series can be seen at his Instagram account.
He has not included Death's escutcheon, the young man and the young woman —
and the order of presentation is original. It's not the same sequence as in Holbein's proofs or in
the printed books.
My vision differs from Holbein's a little bit. Holbein starts with the highest of society, like pope and emperor, but I instead started with society's weakest and let the death slowly walk up the social hierarchy to take those in power who sometimes think that even the death couldn't get to them. I also grouped people by their social class and placed them in hierarchical order from bottom to top: slum-dwellers and criminals, peasants, merchants and townpeople, militarymen and nobles, and, finally, ecclesiasticals.
I did not make the escutscheon of death print because in my vision the death is not a noble, but a great equalizer of us all: both those who are in misery and those who are in power.
(Thy Grief. Personal Correspondence)
External Link
Prints and plates
Other interpreters of Holbein's dance of death
Thy Grief's linocuts are copies of the so-called "proofs" by Holbein.
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Footnotes:
(1)
»
According to Hugo they were destroyed by fire shortly after the
publication of 1825« (page 32).
The right year is probably 1803, and it seems that
Thy Grief has conflated the genuine Bewick with
with the fake Bewick that Wright published in the Portfolio in 1825:
»Mr. Wright declares, in connection with these cuts, that "expense is an object
which is never regarded in supporting the character of the Portfolio"«.
However this doesn't affect my argument: that Wildridge
is not trying to pass the 11 woodcuts off as genuine Bewick.
Dances of death
Holbein's dance of death
Thy Grief
