[Baren]: The mailing list / discussion forum for woodblock printmaking. Baren Digest Monday, 29 June 1998 Volume 03 : Number 197 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: April Vollmer & John Yamaguchi Date: Sun, 28 Jun 1998 11:01:15 -0400 Subject: [Baren 1019] Re: Sun Bleaching for Mold I have a friend who is an art conservator, who told me the best way to deal with LIGHT mold, is to sun bleach it. This is done by immersing the entire print in a tray of water and leaving it in the sun a few hours. Of course, if you have a lot of pigment on the surface, this could lift it up, but if the color is well in the washi, water should not hurt it. And it should work for oilbase, depending on the paper. In addition, THROW AWAY anything really moldy, as it will spread spores to clean paper. Occasionally it is superficial and can be razor bladed off, but once in the fiber is almost impossible to clean off. Per my friend, and my own experience. **** Hi everybody! Missed you while I was away! Hope this response is not too out of date, I am just catching up with my mail after having been away in Italy for two weeks. I still havn't read all my mail, I had 130 e-mails when I got back!!! Baren the worst offender! Saw just one woodcut in Italy: a beautiful 17th C? medical illustration of a kidney in a book. Prints were for information then and were the way the world learned about Italy's art...Goltzius was key. (James remined me of how great he is!) I have seen his print of the antique sculpture of the Farnese Hercules so often that it was quite a shock to see the ACTUAL Farnese Hercules in Naples. Italy is about sculpture and architecture, not prints. We visited Pompeii, Herculaneum and Paestum. Great ruins, frescoes, landscapes, food. No great prints to see, but got lots of ideas for new prints of my own. April Vollmer ------------------------------ From: David Bull Date: Mon, 29 Jun 1998 09:56:55 +0900 Subject: [Baren 1020] Woodblock dreams ... I think this might turn out to be a bit long ... please excuse me ... It's been another jam-packed, hanga-filled week - trying to get a lot of loose ends wrapped up in the interval between finishing off print #95 and the arrival of my daughters for their summer holidays. But then, every week is a jam-packed hanga-filled week for me ... Perhaps though, it's getting a bit much ... I'm even starting to have bizarre dreams about woodblock stuff ... * * * Last month I spent a few days in London doing some research on Japanese prints (if I can use the rather formal word 'research' for what was really just some woodblock print 'sight-seeing'). In one of the museums I visited I had a chance to see something interesting in addition to the boxes of prints themselves that were brought out for my perusal. They had acquired a few of the original woodblocks that had been used to make some of the prints. These blocks were not all that old, only dating back about a hundred years, to the late Meiji period, but that was no disappointment at all - that was the period in which the carvers' skills reached their highest peak. Seeing these blocks was quite interesting for me, as it is very difficult to learn about carving techniques from looking only at finished prints; 'reverse engineering' can only take one so far - what is 'invisible' in the prints themselves are things like just at what angle the blade was held, or how deeply the carver cut into the wood. So I quite appreciated this rare chance. It was a bit frustrating though - the blocks were of course quite well-used, having printed a number of editions over the years. The fine lines were all rounded on the top, and there were chips, splits and cracks here and there throughout the wood. I found myself trying to imagine what they must have looked like when they were new, just out from 'under the knife' ... trying to imagine just how incredibly crisp and sharp those lines must have been ... How beautiful they must have been - but how could one now, here in the Heisei era, ever get a chance to see such a thing? Only in one's dreams ... Let's step back in time a 'few' years, and imagine that one of the woodblock publishers one day had an idea for a new publication - a print of a rather classical type, a 'bijin-ga' ('beautiful woman picture') featuring a lady applying traditional makeup to her face and neck. Her intricately patterned kimono would be pushed down slightly over one shoulder, and she would be looking into a small hand-held mirror, the reverse of which would be detailed in black lacquer and gold. Her coiffure would be carefully done up, but not so carefully that wisps of loose hair couldn't escape here and there around the edge of her face and neck ... incredibly tiny and delicate hairs that would give a master carver an opportunity to stretch his skills to the limit ... The print would be quite large, and would use a full 'masa-ban' sheet of paper, just about double the size of most typical ukiyo-e prints. It would be a spectacular masterpiece! The publisher calculated the economics of the proposed project, the special paper that would have to be ordered, the extra printing costs for the mica background he was envisaging, and he of course did not forget to include the rather staggering costs of so many 'double-size' cherry blocks. It was a close call to make, and there was no question that it would be quite a gamble. But he wanted to believe that surely buyers could be found for such a print when completed, so held down his doubts, and decided to proceed with the project. But one question mark still did still loom large - when completed this would indeed be an expensive print, and the market for it would not be among the tourists from overseas who were looking for a souvenir of the 'quaint' Japan they were visiting, but would be among those people, foreigners and Japanese alike, who were connoisseurs of the woodblock print. And these people were strict! They would look at the print very closely indeed before making their purchase decision, inspecting all the critical areas, the body outlines, the face, and of course the delicate hair ... The publisher knew that the carving would have to be nothing short of magnificent, or the project would fail. He cast his mind over the craftsmen he knew ... which one among them would be the best one to take on this job? He thought about this very important decision for quite some time, and then had an interesting idea - - he would call up Nakagawa Mokurei and see if he could talk him into doing these blocks. Nakagawa-san had actually retired a couple of years previous to this; the long days spent hunched over the bench, nose pressed close to the wood, had finally started to become just too much for his elderly body, and he had 'hung up' his tools. But perhaps he could be coaxed back into the saddle for one more job ... "Please come and do these blocks - this print is going to be a true masterpiece, and you are the only man left alive who can do it justice. _Please_ do this for us ..." And the old man, whether out of obligation to the publisher, or out of pride at being selected for this special job it is difficult to say, consented to the proposal, and agreed to do the job. For the key block, the block on which all the most delicate carving would be done, a wide slab of the finest mountain cherry was selected from the stock available. The tree had been felled, sliced into planks, and roughly dressed some years before this, and the wood had spent the intervening time slowly drying and stabilizing. The selected piece was now cut to the proper dimensions and then received its final smoothing and dressing with a series of hand planes, each one finer and trimming a thinner shaving than the one before it, until the surface of the wood was as smooth as the finest mirror. Immense care was taken in the preparation of the hanshita, the tracing that would be Nakagawa san's guide. It was not possible for any artist to draw hair lines as fine as those that he would carve, but Nakagawa-san didn't need such 'assistance' - just show him the general outline of the design, and his lifetime of carving experience and his sense of how lines should flow would do the rest. So with everything thus ready, the work began. The old carver was soon back in the swing of the work; it took no more than a couple of hours for the old rhythms to return, and his blade sliced along the lines of the hanshita with smooth confidence. The work of cutting lines such as this can not be done in a mood of extreme care and painstaking progress, but rather must proceed with a smooth and easy naturalness. No matter how delicate the line may be, the carver's knife must slide along it as easy and naturally as the brush of the artist who originally drew the design. If not, then the resulting lines on the print would be 'hard' and lifeless. But Nakagawa-san was a master at this. Day-by-day the carved area of the block expanded in size as he worked over first one area and then the next. Nobody was asking him to 'hurry up' ... nobody pushed him in any way ... One can suppose that the old man knew that this would be his final job, and who could fault him for wanting to make sure that this block would be a masterpiece. When all the lines had finally been incised into the wood the clearing of the wide waste areas began. In the real old days ... 'way back when' ... the block would have been turned over to less-experienced carvers for this part of the job, but Nakagawa-san kept it on his own bench, and did this himself. This was to be _his_ masterpiece! At last the key block was done, and when the publisher came to inspect the work he was astonished at what he saw. He had been in the business for a long long time, but never, never, had he seen a block like this. Nakagawa-san had produced ... not a simple block for making a wood block print, but ... a sculpture. Of course, it was functional as a block for printing, but in addition to carving all the lines, and then removing the unneeded waste between them the old man had carefully and neatly sculpted each area of the wood into gentle curves and valleys. The carved lines - and how astonishingly finely they had been carved! - stood up clearly against the smoothly dressed background wood. The artist's design was as clear here on the block as it would later be when pressed into the soft white paper. This block _itself_ was the masterpiece; the fact that it could then be used to make prints seemed almost irrelevant. What pride Nakagawa-san must have felt as he sat and showed it to the publisher! And then ... (Oh, I can't ... I _can't_ type this next sentence ...) And then ... the old man died. Do you think that only in a dream it could have happened this way? That incredible block truly _had_ been the old man's final masterpiece ... After the funeral ceremonies were over, the publisher sat in his office and looked at the block. It would not be a major problem to find another carver to complete the job - to cut the set of colour blocks that were needed to make the print. That part of the work would traditionally have been done by less experienced carvers anyway. But as he sat and studied the block, the beautifully flowing smooth surface of the carved wood surrounding the fine hair lines, he couldn't bring himself to simply 'pass it on' to the next man ... He thought for a while, and then slipped it carefully onto a shelf in his office, where he would be able to look up at it during his work, and moved on with other projects. What was in his mind as he did this? Perhaps the difficult economics of the project were starting to worry him a bit ... perhaps he simply wanted to let a polite amount of time pass after Nakagawa-san's death before asking the next carver to continue the work ... we do not know. The days went by, the months went by, and the years went by ... Other projects came and went, as the business of the publishing house continued uninterrupted. Decades went by, and that day finally came when the publisher retired, and his successor inherited the business; inherited the building, the stock of prints on hand, the woodblocks for all their back catalogue of prints, and of course ... now carefully wrapped and stored on a shelf, the block for the forgotten print ... The block that had been carved as the final masterpiece of a master carver, and then never used for making prints; the delicate lines still as sharp and clear as the day they had been incised, all those decades ago. In publishing houses, collections and museums around the world, a good number of old carved blocks are carefully preserved. By studying them, we can get a pretty good idea of the working methods and skills of the old carvers. But only a 'pretty good' idea. These blocks have of course been used and re-used and re-used, and with each sheet of each re-printing the delicate lines were eroded a few more molecules by the particles of the pigment. Looking at them is like looking at an ancient sculpture in the Egyptian desert; the centuries of blowing sand have turned the sculptor's sharply incised lines into dull and formless rounded shapes. But imagine if somehow, somewhere, a carved woodblock could have been preserved from those sands of time ... Just try and _imagine_ how it might have happened ... * * * Dave B. ------------------------------ From: David Bull Date: Mon, 29 Jun 1998 15:32:10 +0900 Subject: [Baren 1021] Flower Power ... Note: Although the header says that this message is from Dave, it is actually being forwarded from Graham. - --- begin forwarded message --- Thought maybe you guys would like to see one of my other passions. I have 4 pieces of sculpture around the property. The attached is the latest effort. A friend was here and had a digital camera. He sent this to me so thought I would sent it around. Enjoy Graham Soon time to get back in the studio....as apposed to outside it. - --- end forwarded message --- Note from Dave: Graham attached a photo to his message, but this was refused by the [Baren] server, as are all photo attachments. But I was able to decode the file, and stored it at: http://www.woodblock.com/temporary/graham_vase.jpg It is just about 60K. Thanks for this Graham, but may I please remind everybody not to send photos to the list. The mailing list software will reject them, as it causes endless trouble, especially for the digest subscribers. Put them up on your web site, and send the URL to the list. If you don't have a web site, contact me directly, and we'll do it this way ... putting them in that temporary directory at woodblock.com ------------------------------ End of Baren Digest V3 #197 ***************************