Learning by doing

A couple of people have commented that I seemed down in the last post.  No, not at all.  Sometimes facing unfortunate realities is depressing, but that wasn't one of those times.  Sometimes facing reality is freeing.

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For starters, I've resumed art-making... working on a lino print.  For those who aren't familiar with what that is, you carve out a design on a piece of linoleum, then you make a print from it.  Nothing to it, right?  Not so, as it turns out.  

One of essences of a lino print is that it reduces the image you have in mind into colour vs. absence of colour -- or, colour vs. the whiteness of the paper.  You imagine an image, then you must "see" it in binary terms: black and white.  (Although, of course, you could use coloured ink, but for the moment let's keep this simple.)  Therein is the first challenge: how to translate the nuances of light and shadow into their extremes.  What part of the image needs to be dark; what part light?  

Sounds easy enough.  Imagine a little house, with a front door and windows on each side.  Obviously the windows and door would be white and the house black; let's put a little black doorknob on the front door, hmm?  Now let's put a tree beside the house and three flowers on the other side.  The trees and flowers are black; so far so good.  Next we'll put a couple of puffy clouds in the sky.  Hey, wait a minute.  So far the background is white, which means the clouds have to be black... but who wants black clouds floating over our bucolic little house?  The clouds should be white... which would mean the sky would have to be black.  But the house and tree are black, so how will we distinguish them from a black sky?  Okay, white outlines around them; problem solved.  Unattractive solution, maybe, but no more problemo!  Wait, now that the sky is black, should the clouds be moon and stars?  Oh, fer crying out loud!  As you can see, even in this simple example things get complicated.  

There is another binary to consider in planning the image: the high points and low points.  Lino prints, like woodblock prints and others, are called relief prints.  Carving out the block "relieves" material from it, and the high and low points of the resulting surface are what create the image.  The high points will take the ink; the low parts, where you carve away the lino, will be ink-free and will be pristine white in the print... or so you intend.  In reality, it's not that simple.  The carving tools leave marks in the low points, and paper is flexible and will bend into them.  If you have any large expanses that you want to be white, especially around the edges of the image, it's near-impossible to avoid traces of ink showing up where you don't want them.  You have to plan the high points and low points of the image accordingly.  The foreground in my little house drawing would be very difficult to keep clear of unintended marks.

Moreover, while it's not hard to carve out a thin white line in a field of black, the reverse is extremely difficult.  Lino is relatively unforgiving.  In my little drawing above, the mullions on the windows, the stem and leaves of the flowers and the flagstone pattern of the walkway would be near-impossible to carve as I've drawn them.  That cute little doorknob?  Good luck with that!  No doubt all of them could be done if you have the carving skill; me, I haven't got there yet.

Okay, with all those considerations duly considered, eventually you settle on the details of the image.  Then, it has to be reversed onto the carving block in order to appear the right way around on the paper.  You already have a headache from sorting out what the image will look like and now you have to create its mirror image?  How?  There are several ways and I won't go into the technicalities; suffice to say that despite some careful-but-not-careful-enough planning on my part, my image ended up the wrong way around, which turned out to have an interesting consequence (more later).

Once you have your image transferred to the lino block, the next step is to carve it.  In this case, the lesson is painful and bloody: always carve away from your body parts.  Damn, those tools are sharp!  Until they're not, which is when you get so wrapped up in pushing them harder that you forget to carve away from your fingers.  Great!  Once the blood is mopped up, you'll get to practice your sharpening skills.  

Several bandaids later, if you're a slow learner as apparently I am, the carving is done and you're ready to print.  You use a roller to spread ink across the surface of the lino block, lay it face down on the paper, flip the whole business over and rub the surface of the paper to press it against the inked block.  Bingo.  The inked image transfers to the paper and you have a print.

You peel the paper off the block and reality sets in.  First, there are marks on the print that weren't in your plans.  You reach for the tools and carve down the offending high points, re-ink the block and try again.  Shit.  Now you're seeing the image you (more or less) intended... and it ain't singing.  You thought you could get away with those white areas at the edge, but no.  You carve away some more and try again.  Now there's so much ink on the block that the shallowest carvings aren't showing up.  Simultaneously, there are places that obviously weren't inked enough, so they're patchy.  Damn.  Several tries later, you have a print that more or less suffices... at which point you can stand back and see the actual drawing as it has translated into a print.  Well, there's no getting around it... it looked a whole lot better in your imagination.

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A couple of days after all of this, my studio buddy, Peter, mentioned that he had seen the print so I asked him for his comments.  His first and only question was: did you print the image backwards?  Shit.  Yes.  My earlier failure to transfer the image onto the lino block properly transmitted distinctly into the finished print.  Of all the things, Peter could have picked up on, he discerned that the image should have faced in the other direction?  Wow.  Therein is much, much to ponder.  Can a drawing's mirror image be "wrong"?  So it appears.

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Does this sound discouraging?  Heck, no!  I haven't made a print in four years... and having learned (or re-learned) so much, I simply climbed right back up on the horse and moved on.  Redrew the image, changing the dimensions.  Corrected the proportions (so I hope).  Eliminated the white expanses at the edges of the block.  Used a different process for transferring the image to the lino block and thereby got the orientation right for printing.  Loosened up on the carving -- an experiment that may prove flawed.  Tomorrow, I'll print.  If it turns out, I'll post it.

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So much to have learned, simply by having tried.  Making art is a process of continual learning if one is attentive to the lessons... continual instruction by the art-making itself.  I am so glad to have been to art school and to have gotten a BFA, but the learning never ends you dance at the edges of your comfort zone and pay attention!