A late happy new year and some woodcutting

This comes a bit late, of course, but here is a happy new year to all of you out there, anyway.

I didn't have much to blog about in the art world recently because I just didn't have much opportunity to make art. I did see a few great shows (Anselm Kiefer @ SFMOMA, the FineArt print fair at Ft. Mason center this weekend, just to mention two that jump to mind), but I just didn't have much opportunity to create new art. I dabbled with a few wood cuts, though. Mostly, these were experiments, and here is the result of one of them.

I consider this an experiment because typically I use really nice wood to cut on. Either shina, cherry, poplar or lauan wood (a type of mahogany that's great for woodmaking) - typically as veneer with a really smooth grain (except for the lauan which has a very coarse texture). Or linoleum, of course. Smooth, even, all you can wish for. But I know that some of the most interesting woodcuts really make use of imperfections in the wood, use gnarly (is that a word?), semi-weathered wood and just pieces of wood found. I actually collected candidate pieces for quite a while already, but never had the time to do something with them.

Also, I was worried that my nice lino-cutting and wood cutting knives could get damaged with coarse wood. That is, until another printmaker pointed out that this is nonsense, that's what the knives are made for ("just make sure you don't hit a hidden nail or such"). Oooookaaayy...

I did some more research and heard an interesting tip about working on weathered wood: when you rub the wood with linseed oil and let that dry it will take printing ink better, especially when it's slightly weathered wood. So that's what I did and it did work well.

The resulting print is on the left. It's not the most specacular print but it proved the point that you can make something interesting even with a piece of old board you found on a construction site. Now I feel almost like a German Expressionist (they also often worked on found wood, I hear). It is also the largest wood cut I've made so far (the board is about 20" x 5.5" which is much taller than all my earlier woodcuts. Note the super strong texture on the wood which originates from the weathered wood. I even sanded the board a bit to tone down the texture and it still was that strong! The main challenge, I found, is how inconsistent the hardness / softness of such weathered wood is. Some parts of the board cut like butter, and others like really old, hard linoleum. And you have to adjust to those differences as you cut - often within one line that is being cut. A bit of a challenge. But if it was easy it wouldn't be fun, right?

I have more experiments to talk about, but they have to wait for the next update.