Artist's Garden

Wood, ink, and paper: three materials as essential to the wood engraver as soil, water, and air are to the gardener. My understanding of these materials -- both the wood engraver's and the gardener's -- has deepened with time and practice.Wood is composed of cellulose. And paper is also cellulose, although the best papers are made not from wood but from the cellulose found in other plant stems, such as cotton, flax, and hemp. Ink is made of carbon -- traditionally, lamp-black -- which is derived from petroleum, the forest deposits of prehistoric time buried under layers of rock. Those three materials are therefore linked in an integral way. The printmaker combines them to produce patterns engraved on wood, inked, and pressed onto paper. There is a rightness, a kind of harmony, in their interaction that satisfies both the maker and the viewer of wood block prints.It takes about two hundred years for a boxwood tree to reach a diameter of six inches -- the minimum size practical for a block maker to use to make the end-grain blocks for wood engraving. This slow rate of growth produces a grain so tight and so even in hardness that the artist can engrave lines a fraction of a millimetre apart without crumbling the wood standing between the lines.I still engrave on wood -- boxwood, when it is available, rather than another wood or a synthetic substitute. Some of my blocks are becoming a bit thin. Each time I am finished with a design, I get Joe Spratt, Canada's premier block maker, to mill off the top of the block until my engraved lines are all removed and to prepare the surface for a new engraving. And I build up the bottom of the block with firm cardboard to keep the block's height equal to the height of the printing type. Eventually some of my blocks will be more cardboard than wood, but as long as the top surface is boxwood, I don't mind what material the bottom layers are.In spite of the computerization of printing, there are still sources of letterpress ink, slow-drying and viscous and black. This availability attests to the existence of a fair number of people who still print from wood or other relief blocks and, at least in some cases, hot-metal type. In fact, I believe that there are more of us now than when we published Wood, Ink and Papertwenty years ago, in 1980. Thanks to a network of wood engravers, I now feel less isolated than I did then, even though there are still many miles between myself and my nearest colleague.There are also more hand-papermakers, and it is now almost unnecessary for me to import paper from Europe. I only make a tiny proportion of my own -- usually decorative end-papers for my books when I want some particular botanical inclusion or bizarre ingredient. And there is real hope that hemp paper will soon become available, hemp being the fibre that lasts longer than any other -- unless it meets fire or flood, those two great enemies of paper.I now have a studio that is open to the public six months a year, unlike the relatively hidden country place on which I lived twenty years ago, and I have the benefit of meeting for the first time a lot of the people who know and collect my work. Two of the words I hear them apply to my prints astonish me: 'realistic' and 'photographic'. I am surprised at this because I think of my work as being very abstract. I perceive a three-dimensional and coloured world and reduce it to black-and-white patterns on two-dimensional paper. This is something like music heard and then reduced to a score set down on paper. And viewers of my prints, like musicians who can reconstitute the score into music in their heads, can read my images and imagine something close to the subject I experienced at the start of my creative exercise. The process I go through as I create an image remains largely mysterious to me, but I do know that it is far from merely registering, as accurately as possible, the material presented to my eye. IBrandis, Gerard Brender à is the author of 'Artist's Garden' with ISBN 9780889842236 and ISBN 088984223X.