In today's post, I show the ten-step process that I used to make one of my woodblock prints in 1996.
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| St. Mark's Cathedral During an Organ and Choral Recital |
The story starts in the early nineties when my friend Mike and I managed to get admission to an organ and choral performance at Saint Mark's Cathedral in Seattle with only enough money between the two of us for one ticket. We discovered that a party was short one attendee and had left their extra ticket at the door for a poor artist like one of us and we took it. I had a sketchbook and drawing board with me and I drew the audience, the choir, and the architecture. Most of the resulting sketch was influenced by one of the pieces on the program—a movement of Messiaen's L'Ascension. As I was listening and drawing, I thought of a passage from In Search of Lost Time in which Proust describes music from a violin, as I remember, filling the room visually.
I took the sketch home and began turning it into the woodblock print you see above and I titled it Saint Mark's Cathedral During an Organ and Choral Recital.
To make this print, I needed to carve blocks of wood to roll with ink and press into paper.
This is what one of the carved blocks looked like. The blocks were destroyed long ago because they were too large and heavy to keep.
This block happens to be the fourth block in the sequence of runs using, as you can see, violet ink. If you look closely, you can see an arrow that tells me which way is up and a number four that tells me when to print the block (after the third block). You might notice that the image in the block is a mirror image of the final print.
In the following ten pictures, the print evolves through successive impressions from each of ten different woodblocks. Each run is a different color ink rolled onto a hand-carved block of pine and transferred to the rice paper by rubbing the back of the paper with barrens and wooden spoons.
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| Ten |
The color is not entirely accurate, due to the fact that the value changed with each run so the auto-exposure on the camera shifted. Or maybe it's my cheap scanning equipment. Nonetheless, you should be able to see the transformation.
If you are very observant, you might have noticed my use of wood grain. Some of the blocks were topped with strategically placed pieces of 1/4 inch plywood before carving. In this way, I was able to orient the wood grain in various directions, even on one block—a trick that owes a lot to Paul Klee's ideas about visual polyphony.
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| Detail |
But all this work does not give the whole story of the process involved. Before making the print, I had to make test prints to find the formulas for the colors because most of the colors, as we can see, exist only after two or more inks combine.
The final print has scores of different colors in it. In order to know the formulas for each color in the final print, I had to make some test prints first. Using these test prints, I could tell which area to leave raised on which blocks in order to get the inks to combine into a particular color in a particular spot on the print.
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| Test Prints |
At one point, I hauled all twenty test blocks fifteen miles by foot and buses across town to a printing press. I pulled my tests and got kicked out of the art center only minutes after finishing because of an auction I hadn't been told about. After two more bus rides and a lot of walking, I made it the fifteen miles back home in time for my canvas bags to finally start ripping apart from the weight.
Printmaking is hard work. After all this preparation, only two prints were made in the laborious process of inking and hand-rubbing the ten blocks that combine to make the final image. It was the last printmaking I did before turning to painting. I had never made a print like this before. Previously, my woodblock prints involved just a few blocks and I had pulled the prints on presses. But I'd seen hand-rubbed woodcuts made with many blocks and I knew I could do something similar. I had only an idea what the print might look like, though, and until the last few runs, it didn't look like much at all. One of the joys of printmaking—like photography or ceramics—is seeing the art for the first time when the process is complete.
One of the two final prints was exhibited in a show at the University of Washington and they are both now in private collections. There are slight differences between the two, so they are considered an edition of two unique prints. Because of the weight and size of the blocks, as I mentioned, I had to destroy them; I can't carry such things around with me in life. That means someday these two prints may be considered rare examples of my early work.
Here, again, is the finished print:
P.S. I completely lost this whole post due to either a computer glitch or user error, depending on how you might want to look at what I did! But I was able to completely redo the post with minimal variation from the original in only about 20 minutes because I back up things. Always back up things manually! It's actually the auto-save that destroyed the original post, so you can't rely on the computer to do it for you. And, as always, my new post is an improvement over the crashed one!
