sewn paper
e-mail the Author
Art/Wood Engraving
April 2001
176 pages
ISBN 0-88984-223-X
$16.95
An Artist's Garden
Gerard Brender à Brandis
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 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 Paper twenty 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 for 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 the
reduction of music heard and set down on paper in the form of a score.
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 through which I go 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. I change many
lines to satisfy my sense of design, I invent textures which will, I
hope, suggest the surfaces of the objects before me, and I create
systems of light and shadow that will best reveal the fragment of the
world I have chosen to depict. What pleases me is that the image I offer
the viewers challenges them, like musicians faced with a score, to
engage in a creative process of their own, filling out the image with
remembered experience. Turning my white dots and dashes into the
shimmering, iridescent wings of a dragon fly -- and believing in their
own conjuring -- is the necessary corollary to my process of
abstraction. That people are so ready to enter into this give-and-give
game fills me with wonder and gratitude. It is very reminiscent of the
colouring books of childhood, those invitations to fill the spare
outlines with our own sense of the plausible or the fantastic. It is sad
that colouring books were so often misused to train young minds into a
banal obedience to convention. It is a source of joy to see adults
looking at my work and beginning to play.
At fifty-eight I cannot help wondering for how long I will have the good
eye-sight and steadiness of hand required to be a wood engraver. I
expect that the many projects I have in the back of my mind will be too
many for the time available. Lawrence Hyde was still engraving in his
early eighties, but that was unusual. But my nearly twenty burins, in
spite of many passes over the whetstone, continue to fit my hand as
comfortably as they did when I ordered them from T.N. Lawrence & Son at
2 Bleeding Heart Yard in London in the early nineteen-sixties. And the
1882 Albion press, also shipped from England, continues to enable me to
press inked blocks onto dampened hand-made paper. And, so far, there is
still wood enough. I think of all those thousands of small prints that
have filtered out into the world -- now and then I encounter a few,
years after they left me, on someone's wall. It still seems like a
very fortunate way to make a living.
`Brender à Brandis' delicate illustrations evoke tremendous texture
for a medium as difficult as wood engraving, and have a wild, almost Art
Nouveau quality.' -- The Globe and Mail
Photo by Gordon Stephen