Olansa Cuttings

This weekend was fruitful. On Saturday morning I drove down to Oxford Wood Recycling, which isn’t in Oxford at all, but nearby Abingdon. They don’t keep much that’s good for printmaking, unless you’re into carving pier timbers or 8′x4′ ply sheets, but they have a little tub of hardwood offcuts. I’m not sure what wood my choices are but for a couple of pounds they were worth a shot.

Just before I left I joked about how handy the nice metal table would be — just right for propping up my press! “Yours for a tenner,” said the woman in charge. “Done,” said I. Without anything to secure the table in the back of the car, I drove home very slowly and carefully — the A34 isn’t the safest road at the best of times, and I didn’t fancy braking sharply and having to extract steel furniture from the back of my head. But as you can see, the table looks just fine under the nipping press.

From there it was on to the Oxford Orinoco Scrapstore in sunny Headington, on the east side of the city. This place is another small, green triumph. Local companies donate things they might otherwise dump — disks, books, materials, old tools, and so on — and we get the chance to buy them for peanuts. For a princely two pounds I bought an old brace-type drill and bit, two seriously battered chisels, an awl, some foam and neoprene mousemats, some leather scraps and a book on the Aenid. All but the drill and book are handy for printing.

The chisels responded to a couple of hours on sharpening stones — tips like fjord-heavy coastlines gradually smoothed out into flattish sharp edges. Great for clearing the ‘big white bits’ on blocks! I used a Dremel to polish off most of the old paint and rusty bits until they looked like real chisels again. The hand drill will take a lot more work: perhaps it’s time to play with electrolytic rust conversion. The leather scraps are perfect for homemade strops: just add rubbing compound. The foam and neoprene are to try out a Baren guru’s suggestion about flexible registration blocks for relief presses.

On Sunday we forgot all about printmaking and went for a walk along the Ridgeway. The stretch near West Isley was wet, cold and windy, and as beautiful as you could wish for. We saw the huge donut-shape of the new Diamond synchotron in the valley below. The sky changed every few minutes, from tatty black clouds to rainbows to pristine blue. Roll on Spring.

Last week I finally decided to cut a wood block. OK, a small piece of shina. The design was based on a close-up photo of a beetle that somehow ended up on the net curtains of my office last summer. I sketched out a design and left a thick border to about 6″x8″.

Cutting shina was quite a change after playing ‘hunt the knife mark’ with lino. I could see (more or less) how the design was coming along. To make life a little harder I decided to cut all the outlines with a knife rather than gouges. This lasted until the shaded part of the abdomen when I caved in and used a small v-gouge to finish off.

So far, so good. Things went to pieces a little come the printing. I used some fairly heavy, toothed drawing paper for proofing, plus some Lawrence ‘GB’ oil-based washable ink, burnishing using a spoon on some prints and a Speedball baren on others. Humbug. The ink had a couple of hard bits which you can see on the first proof. That wasn’t what bothered me, however. The grain showed everywhere and I couldn’t seem to get any solid blacks even using the spoon.

Time to ask the astounding Baren Forum people for advice… They recommended all sorts of things including burnishing out from the centre, trying thinner Japanese paper, dampening the paper, and so on. The local art store and stationers were out of blotting paper so I’m stuck with dry paper prints until the delivery gets here. Japanese paper I had.

This evening I tried a few more proofs on the Japanese paper (no idea what type — the label fell off!) and had a little more luck. Most of the black solids were just that, except the lousy border! I don’t know. It’s probably my slapdash inking and burnishing, but it’s worse than ever — every little tool-mark caught the ink and printed fuzzily, and the border was patchy as hell.

I’d like to put this through a cylinder press (will shina take the strain?) just to see what might be possible. That’ll have to wait for another day. In the meantime I’ll try another block and start all over again. While keeping on eye on course listings or trying to find some one-on-one coaching from a real printmaker!

Until next time…

In keeping with the ‘post it late’ ethos, here’s mention of an early January visit to the National Art Gallery in Athens.

I had little idea what to expect. From the outside the whole place seemed rather aggressive: warplanes, tanks and whatnot. Turned out it was the wrong place. The gallery was further along the street.

The gallery’s exhibits break down into domestic and some foreign pieces, and again by era. Some periods are very heavily influenced by western European styles, and contain delights regardless. The Booty by Theodoros Rallis centres on a woman who scorns a pretty horrible fate. Nikiphoros Lytras’s gentle paintings Awaiting and The Kiss are wonderful. Many, much sterner, images remind you that modern Greece was forged in a long and gruelling war of independence. And of course there’s El Greco (Doménicos Theotokópoulos). If you’re a devotee, you’ll find three of his works here.

Now let’s set the paintings aside. After all, you want to read about printmakers. In a mezzanine between the ground and basement levels lies a small room filled with prints. Chief among these (for me) were relief prints by Yiánnis Kefallinós, a master engraver, typographer and teacher. My three favourites were My Father (1920), The Big Tree (1925), and The Banana Plant (1939).

I recognised Kefallinós’s work from a marvellous book given to me several years ago by my wife’s cousin Yiorgios: Two Centuries of Modern Greek Engraving. (Δυο Αιώνες Νεοελληνικής Χαρακτικής, ed. Nίkos Grigorákis, 2004, Govostis, ISBN 960-270-976-6). I doubt this book will ever see an English translation, which is a great pity. It catalogues many artists who deserve a wider audience. Now there’s a fun project: an English site about Greek printmaking! While we’re at it, why not an international online printmaking museum? Sign me up…

If you ever find yourself down Athens way and want to see more, there’s also a printmaking museum in one of the northern suburbs: Εngraving Museum at Grigorakis Gallery, Yakinthon 4, Palaio Psihiko, Athens. Telephone: +00 33 1 210 674 0806. It’s open from 6–9 on weekday evenings (probably excluding Monday). We just couldn’t find the time to visit in January. Hopefully I’ll be able to post a small report this summer.

There are many more images of work by Greek printmakers on the Eikastikon site. If you know any decent resources in English or Greek, please let me know. My Greek isn’t up to much but I’ll try and give a sense of what each site is about!

I hadn’t cut a block since the summer of 2006. Sooner or later something had to be done, so I browsed some old photos from a walk in Raleigh Park, the swamp-on-a-slope that runs down the hill behind our house. I stared at a picture of a hawthorn tree-trunk for a full minute before spotting the obvious: a face in the bark. There is something a little fey about the whole top end of the park, so this shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

The urgent need was to make marks on a block so I put an edge on my gouges, made a quick sketch and began to cut.

OK, the result isn’t up to much. My tool skills don’t extend to cutting fine detail in small blocks, and other mistakes crept in — the shadows are misplaced, the ivy resembles a noose — but at least it’s yer actual print on paper.

My oil-based ink had nearly frozen in the garage, but the cheap water-based stuff that rolls like thin black ketchup still took orders. Note to self: keep ink indoors over winter.

I learned another lesson: office paper is lousy for proofing. For this one I tore up some large sheets of good sketching paper and noticed the difference straight away.

After some cross words with my wonky nipping press, I downgraded to a wooden spoon and fingernails. The combination of hand burnishing and decent paper seems to agree with me. I can’t wait to try again with a larger, simpler piece.