Michael Loderstedt

“Creating the print Apollo (Ascendant) gave me an unprecedented window into the hand, mind and aesthetic decisions of another artist living more than two millenniums before me. The entire experience has been unforgettable and life affirming.”
-Michael Loderstedt

The vulnerability and durability of the natural world informs and infuses the work of Michael Loderstedt (American b. 1958). A masterful printmaker, photographer, and installation artist, Mr. Loderstedt allows his communion with his surroundings, be it his native Outer Banks or his adopted shoreline of Lake Erie, to proliferate within his imagery. The horizon where the sky meets the water gently commands our attention and the viewer comes to share the evocative equilibrium of his landscapes, often bathed in steel blue in a variety of media, exhibiting finely honed technical virtuosity.

Apollo (Ascendant), at first blush, appears to be a decisive counterpoint to Mr. Loderstedt’s allegiance to the environment, yielding to a lyrically analytical relationship with a bronze sculpture from the fourth-century BCE. The relationship evolved in the Spring of 2014 when Mr. Loderstedt had the good fortune to have access to Apollo the Python-Slayer, attributed to Praxiteles, not in the lobby of the Cleveland Museum of Art where it holds court, but in the confines of the Objects Lab. As conservators performed art forensics on Apollo, Mr. Loderstedt intimately probed the piece beyond its anecdotal iconography. He recounts:
Having the opportunity to examine Apollo, his dismembered striking arm, and the mutated python carefully was very compelling for a contemporary artist. You could see Praxiteles (or his assistant's) tool markings in the bronze. The gesture of the figure's hand, its pose, the staring eyes, even the damaged areas and reconstructed areas are all giving us fascinating clues into its history, function and presence within Greek culture.

Works that he created during this singular experience, drawings and photographs, coalesced into a series entitled Hidden Apollo. The artist contemplated the role of reproduction in preserving and disseminating knowledge of this enigmatic sculpture, as its earliest written description was most likely used to create many later copies. He found it appropriate that a print could extend the Apollo’s legacy and relationship to reproduction. With a sense of the immediacy of his initial encounter with the bronze, Mr. Loderstedt’s screenprint Apollo (Ascendant) puts the viewer in a privileged position. The preliminary drawing literally elevates the viewer as the sculpture submissively lays on its side; it comes to assume its rightful verticality, ascendant, in the screenprint. However, the omnipotence of a god dominating an ancient Greek temple is now diminished. The artist states,” I wanted to flip that power dynamic, to have the viewer looking down onto this artifact, revealing its fragility and vulnerability.” Further, Mr. Loderstedt enhances the experience of Apollo with a subtle manipulation of color and line:

Each transparency used to make each color, was drawn from life concentrating on a particular aspect of the sculpture's surface- the green marks analyzing the oxidation on the surface of the bronze, the dark gray looking at the light falling across the forms and imperfections. The line drawing gives the body its overall form and proportion. Lastly, the perspectival web of drips provides a cone-like framework for the body to appear to rise within. So, each transparency for the print was created separately, then "stacked" in the final print as transparent layers of ink.

For Mr.Loderstedt, the initial allure of the Apollo bronze relied on the python. Having grown up in the South, the artist professes his youthful fascination with snakes as they occasionally invaded his coastal childhood home. Rooted in North Carolina, Mr. Loderstedt completed his undergraduate education in his home state, earning his BFA in printmaking from East Carolina University in 1981. He completed his MFA at the School of Art at Kent State University in 1985, where he served as Professor of Printmaking and Photography until his retirement in 2017. Widely exhibited, his work is contained in various public collections including the Cleveland Museum of Art, Progressive Insurance, the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, the Akron Art Museum, and the Kupferstich-Kabinett in Dresden, Germany. He has completed international residencies at the Frans Masereel Centrum in Kasterlee, Belgium and the Grafikwerkstatt in Dresden.

Michael Loderstedt’s keen observations and his acute curiosity about the past contribute to the powerful appeal of this print. It is enhanced by his fervent imagination. Apollo (Ascendant), a vital contemporary work in and of itself, reinvigorates a revered ancient deity.

-Darlene G. Michitsch

Apollo (Ascendant), 2018. The Print Club of Cleveland Publication No. 97 for 2019.
Michael Loderstedt (American, b. 1958). Color screenprint on Rives BFK paper; image: 76 x 30.2 cm (29 15/16 x 11 7/8 in.); sheet: 76.8 x 57 cm (30 1/4 x 22 7/16 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of The Print Club of Cleveland 2019.247