Third Vision

From the Artist

Third Visionis about the potential for the victim to triumph over torture, inhumanity, and death. The fragmented body hovering in space and scripted text are characters in this work.
_{—From Brandywine Workshop and Archives records}

Iknew I wanted to be an artist when, in the sixth grade, the principalof my grammar school gave me a bottle of Higgins India ink,precipitating a crisis of self-awareness. During the next six years I drew and painted incessantly;I studied life drawing at the age of 12, at the Graphic Sketch Club (now theSamuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial)in Philadelphia, my hometown; I roamed all over the city in search of “subjects"—street markets, railroad trains, boats in the harbor oh, children at play, the homeless, old barns, landscapes in Fairmount Park(which became my second home), animals at the zoo. Thus, my first stage of development as an artist was essentially mimetic; I had fallen in love with the world of appearances and wanted to capture it all. But because I was also intensely curious, I also fell in love with books, with knowledge for its own sake, and with storytelling. While still in junior high school, I wrote, designed the set for, and acted in a play about the importance of mathematics;studiedgeologic ages of the Earth;designed (on paper) a scale model of our solar system;read the complete Edgar Allan Poe,and the first science fiction magazine in America, Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories.
_{—From Brandywine Workshop and Archives records}

Third Vision, 1985, by Jacob Landau, in an edition of 100, attests to the versatility of the offset medium and the range of possibilities when in the hands of a master draftsman. "With mylar, you can vary the pressure of the pencil, and the line can vary from light to dark as it moves around the composition, mimicking the effects on paper," Allan Edmunds explained. Landau's strong drawing skills and the energy of his line reflect a unique way of working with mylar. Landau's fine lines, distorted by the atmosphere and erupting into bold outlines, presented unique challenges during the plate-burning, exposure process. Landau was a humanist-artist with a long career who spoke directly to political and social issues. He believed that it was the responsibility of an artist to be the conscience of humanity. Third Vision is about the victim's ability to triumph over torture, inhumanity, and death. His work is distinguished by fragmented human bodies floating in space and scripted text. The work itself demonstrates offset's compatibility with fine drafting.
_{—Adapted from "Fresh, Human and Personal: Signature of Brandywine Workshop," Three Decades of American Printmaking: The Brandywine Workshop Collection (Manchester, VT: Hudson Hills Press, 2004)}