[Baren]: The mailing list / discussion forum for woodblock printmaking. Baren Digest Sunday, 22 March 1998 Volume 02 : Number 102 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Blueman Date: Sat, 21 Mar 1998 11:18:38 -0500 Subject: [Baren 492] Re: Baren Digest V2 #101 Hello, my name is Gayle Wohlken from Northeast Ohio,( a village called Burton) to be exact. I've been following the Baren for a couple of weeks and though I don't do Hanga (which I still don't know how to pronounce) woodblock printing, I'm fascinated by what I've seen and heard from you people. What I do is black (oil based) ink on a paper I like because of its color (dark buffish yellowish, hard-to-find-a-mat-that-colorish, and my woodcuts looks good on it). It's called kitakata (and again I don't know how to pronounce that.) I would be interested to know if anyone has tried it and if it's the kind of paper one could dampen. I did a three color block woodcut of a quilt square for a friend who is doing a book about her grandmom's quilts and everytime the grandmother is quoted the quilt square (much reduced of course) will be beside the quote as a marker. I would be interested to see if I could do this with water based inks the way you work, but I don't like white paper too much. I don't know how to put quotes from any of you in my messages those arrowed quotes you have in your messages). So I'd like to say regarding the subject of junk on the internet (which Matt brought up and I would quote here) If something takes too long to download, or there are too many ads, or cookies, one can always leave. But I like that the "library" Dave mentioned is right there for us. I found such things!! Including creating a garden to interest bats. Including a 34 page scientific paper written by a Psychiatrist in England. Including beautiful pictures of the Aurora Borealis. Including you. I like it here very much. Gayle ------------------------------ From: Matthew.W.Brown@VALLEY.NET (Matthew W Brown) Date: 21 Mar 98 13:10:41 EST Subject: [Baren 493] Re: Garden walls Baren, Gayle, welcome!, you wrote: >I don't know how to put quotes from any of you in my messages those arrowed quotes you have in your messages.> Doesn't this all depend on what e-mail program you might be working with? Mine is one called Blitzmail made by Dartmouth college people and I don't think available commercially. I just copy and paste quotes. Many may be using Eudora which has some quoting function, no? Dave wrote: >The 'net in this case is no different from your local library or bookstore - it's full of absolute junk, everywhere you look. Yet I think such places are just about the most important tools that civilization supplies.< Here is some inspiring vision! Are you Dave, thinking of the 'net as like the swamp, or the manure pile,. . . the stuff out of which new life forms are born?! Also I appreciate your comment about the article: >That very story that you pointed us to - the one about the influence of Japanese prints on Van Gogh - is all about taking down walls, not putting them up.< I like this idea too. But of course to have the mind-opening experience of taking down walls, there have to have been walls put up in the first place. Remember this very craft we are working with developed within some amazingly established walls: the Japan of 1650-1850. A fellow living in a neighboring town, Noel Perrin, wrote a book some years ago called "Giving Up the Gun" about how the technology of firearms was known in Japan early on but was then suppressed and eradicated, only to be blown open by Commodore Perry in what, 1853? And then they were buying ukiyo-e prints, formerly unknown, by the hundreds in Paris only ten years later? So Dave you also wrote: >continued isolation is neither beneficial ... nor desirable ... nor healthy.< . . . And your Shunsho (have I his name right?) was working within a time of serious isolation, on a small island country, as were the others: Haronobu, Utamaro, Hiroshige; not to mention the craftsmen working with them (while the rest of the world was breaking walls pell-mell into Africa, India, the American West, South Sea islands). So perhaps walls are not all bad. Certainly there are different sorts of walls on many levels. . . and perhaps a gate can be a 'poetic' way of breaking a wall, beautifully, again and again . . . I am tempted to try to break a wall right here: I have meant to ask you for some time; how do you go about doing the embossing of the lettering on your prints? I assume you are using cast lead monotype, or linotype. Held in some kind of jig with kento? Matt ------------------------------ From: Matthew.W.Brown@VALLEY.NET (Matthew W Brown) Date: 21 Mar 98 14:05:19 EST Subject: [Baren 494] Libraries Baren: More thoughts on walls (and libraries): (Oh go on, doesn't he know when to stop?!) Dave, now think of the black line in your prints. Are not these 'walls' for your colors, dividing color from color and pattern from pattern? I can tell you that to work without this black line is to introduce some new troubles (though exciting ones, no doubt). For myself I can think of some pretty different libraries: remember the Library in Umberto Ecco's "The Name of the Rose"?, not many books, but those few that it held. . . When I went in to Dartmouth's art library some years ago their computer catalogue told me W. Phillips' book was available in Boston, in D.C., in Texas, i. e. almost unobtainable for me at the time; months later on a whim I checked the old card catalogue and found a listing for the book. Marked "discarded" I went ahead and pursued their storage collection, they still had the book! Somehow thinking of this experience is like being reminded to be careful with these computers: there are some wonderful walls that might want to be left standing. Speaking of which, am I abusing a wall of sorts to go on at such length? Matt (Having trouble knowing where are the walls of this computer world. . .) ------------------------------ From: David Bull Date: Sun, 22 Mar 1998 08:59:37 +0900 Subject: [Baren 495] Re: Gardens ... Hello Gayle, and welcome to [Baren] ... > It's called kitakata ... > I would be interested to know if anyone has tried it and > if it's the kind of paper one could dampen. When using water based pigments, most Japanese papers will give much better results when they are damp, as the pigments then sink into the paper better, but I have no experience of using oil inks! There's one way to find out ... > I would be interested to see if I could do this > with water based inks the way you work, but I don't > like white paper too much. I don't think there is any connection here ... that kitakata paper of yours should take a good impression from water-based pigments too. By the way, are you using a press? a baren? something else? ***** Matt wrote: > the swamp, or the manure pile,. . . the stuff out of which > new life forms are born?! I don't know that this is exactly the kind of image I had in mind! More like a 'fountain' of ideas and inspiration, I think. > about how the technology of firearms was known in Japan > early on but was then suppressed and eradicated I'm not sure that 'suppressed and eradicated' would be the proper terms; my guess would be that it was just that the particular technology wasn't suited to the practices and the ethos of that culture - shooting at your enemy from a distance, rather than 'honourably' attacking face-to-face ... Actually, there's another example more closely related to our printmaking work - the Japanese tried printing books from moveable type for a while (late 1500's ~ early 1600's), and then gave it up in favour of printing from blocks with the text carved in place. Printing from type didn't come back until the Meiji period, more than 250 years later ... Suppressed? I don't think so. It's just that moveable type, where _every_ repetition of each letter looks exactly the same, didn't suit a writing system where each character is drawn differently depending on what precedes and follows it ... > ... perhaps walls are not all bad. Of course not, and I wasn't trying to be against Matt's concept of a 'garden'. Without setting any boundaries for our activities, everything would dissolve in a formless chaos. Perhaps it's just that since coming out here into cyberspace I'm feeling more 'open' to influences from outside. After all, living alone here as I do, it's very easy to wrap oneself up in the work, and never peek over the garden wall ... *** > how do you go about doing the embossing > of the lettering on your prints? I use standard 'katsuji' (metal type) which I scrounge from a local printing shop. I hold it face up in a jig which carries a kento mark, and then print in the normal way, with a baren (no pigment, no water, no paste). I use a cheap student baren, because I think the metal type might perhaps cause more wear and tear on it than a woodblock would. *** Also from Matt: > ... W. Phillips' book was available in Boston, in D.C., ... etc. It's funny you should mention this just now, because my very own copy arrived in the mail last week! I found it in a little bookshop in Virginia ... by using the Bibliofind web site. http://208.144.214.69/cgi-bin/texis.exe/search.vor I have wanted a copy of this book for a long time, and had seen a copy in a used bookshop back in Canada, but the owner wanted many hundreds of dollars for it, more than I was willing to pay. So I've been looking for it on Bibliofind by searching using the keywords 'woodblock', 'woodcut' and 'printmaking'. I have turned up a number of other interesting items for my growing little 'woodblock library' here, but never found the Phillips book. But in a moment of inspiration a couple of weeks ago, I searched using 'Phillips', and up it popped! It hadn't come up with the other keywords because the actual title is 'Technique of the Color Wood-cut' ... With a hyphen! It's an absolutely pristine copy, printed from real type on beautiful laid paper, and I was very happy to pay the $40 the bookshop owner wanted. (And when I received it I saw that he must have been very happy to sell it to me for $40 - there is a price of $1 written in pencil inside it!) >From a dusty shelf in a little bookshop in Virginia ... to a very appreciative owner in a suburb of Tokyo ... only possible on the 'Net, I think ... Dave ------------------------------ End of Baren Digest V2 #102 ***************************