George A. Walker - The Woodcut Artists Handbook: Techniques and Tools for Relief Printmaking

The Woodcut Artists

HANDBOOK

Techniques and Tools for Relief Printmaking

From the strain of binding opposites comes harmony.

Heraclitus

A central principle I always teach my students is the value of opposites. Heraclitus said two thousand years ago that art is shaped by the tensions that exist between opposites. Harmony, he says, needs low and high, as progeny needs man and woman. This manifests itself in myriad ways: simplicity and complexity, drama and comedy, tradition and innovation, real and perceived, large and small, concave and convex, controlled and accidental, deliberate and spontaneous, to list a few. But of this interplay of opposites, none is more immediate than the contrast of dark line on light surface or light line on dark surface. Without the contrast you see nothing. Simple as that.

This is the fundamental nature of relief prints, which derive most of their graphic and emotive power from the stark contrasts between negative areas of the block that are cut away and appear white, and positive areas that are left standing and print black. It is this directness, this immediacy and simplicity, combined with the fact that they can be printed with the back of a wooden spoon, that lends woodcuts appeal for political statement and social protest.

These are what we might call broad relief prints: capacious in appearance, the result of energetic, spontaneous and often brusque execution. Most beginning practitioners find working with broad shapes in a raw potato, soft wood or linoleum with simple, unassuming tools to be a satisfying, quick and enjoyable enterprise that can be done with relatively little expertise or training. This is not to say that a linoleum cut cannot yield a dense print comparable to a mezzotint, because I have seen just such work done by Eastern Europe printmakers using hypodermic needles to prick minute stipples in oversized lino blocks producing rich, undulating images of astonishing richness and subtlety. However, this is not the essential nature of the broad printmaking media.

Relief printmaking, a distinctly different approach, produces what we might call fine relief prints. In this category, wood engraving is the benchmark and paradigm.

Wood engravings (and what I call relief engravings that are done in Resingrave, a synthetic substitute for end-grain wood) have a polished and fastidious appearance and are the result of clean, laborious execution that is studied and highly deliberate. There is no such thing as spontaneous engraving. In contrast to the broad prints, I know no engraver who found engraving to be a satisfying endeavor when he or she began. Most, including myself, found it excruciatingly frustrating to produce, with great and undue labor, prints that could just as easily have been done in linoleum. The medium is relentlessly unforgiving. The tools are quirkier, more varied, more expensive and harder to find.

Fine printmaking is tediously slow in both process and production. While engravings can be printed by hand with a wooden spoon or other smooth, hard tool, the most sophisticated engraved impressions, those wherein the ranges of grays are myriad and uniform throughout the edition by intention not accident, are done on the printing press.

Thus wood engraving is absent from sociopolitical commentary. Slow craftsmanship and intellectual consideration do not sting reprobate politicians or corporate thugs as do the big, bold and aggressive prints of a Posada.

Whether it be a broad slap at an arrogant politician, or a meditation on the Divine, the relief print can do it all with natural ease an ease that results from directness, inartificiality, immediacy and simplicity.

Barry Moser, 2005