Black Egret

Ellen Lanyon

Chicago printmaker Ellen Lanyon shows her exceptional drawing skills to create this large lithograph of two African Black Egrets, done at Landfall Press in Chicago with Master Printer Jack Lemon.

The bird in the foreground is sketched in, as if in glaring sunlight, the other in contrast with its black plumage. Lanyon focuses the viewer's attention on the two birds by just suggesting a landscape as a surround, using an ink that is only a shade or two darker than the paper itself with small touches of blue added to the head of bird in the foreground. The whole lithograph is printed on a light gray paper.

During courtship, the Black Egret (Heron) grows long feather plumes on its crown and nape. The black heron occurs through Sub-Saharan Africa, from Senegal and Sudan to South Africa, but is found mainly on the eastern half of the continent and in Madagascar. It has also been observed in Greece and Italy.

Ellen Lanyon was born on December 21, 1926, in Chicago, Illinois. She grew up on the South Side of Chicago and attended Hyde Park High School. Lanyon studied at the University of Chicago, and earned her BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1948, and her MFA at the University of Iowa in 1950.

Lanyon’s paintings, drawings and prints were hung in galleries and museums all over the world, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Krannert Museum, the McNay Museum, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the Brauer Museum. Three major retrospective exhibitions of her work were mounted. Her work was included in numerous group exhibitions and she had seventy-five solo gallery exhibitions.

In the 1960s she managed Ox-Bow, an art school in Saugatuck, Michigan affliliated with the Art Institute of Chicago. She taught for almost forty years at universities and professional art schools and retired as an Associate Professor of Cooper Union in New York. Ellen Lanyon died in New York on October 7, 2013.