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We are now half a year later ...
This one is something a
bit different, not a reproduction of a traditional
Japanese print ... but not my original either. It
was designed by the contemporary Japanese
illustrator Yoshio Okada, and represents 'Akashi',
one of the characters in the famous Genji
Monogatari, for which Mr. Okada had created a
long series of illustrations.
The publisher Saeki-san, whom we met a few pages
back, had published four of Mr. Okada's
illustrations in a beautiful set of prints, and it
was for the purpose of purchasing that set that I
had originally visited him during our first trip to
Japan. At that time he had given me a 'bonus' to go
along with the print set - a copy of the book
containing the full set of illustrations. I thought
(and think) they were pretty special, and even
though I had no permission to do so, made a
reproduction of one of them.
(click image for a larger
version in a 'popup' window)
I thought I was starting to get pretty close to
making 'real' prints, and as far as the carving
went, I was. The printing though, was still awful.
I hadn't the slightest idea of what I was doing - I
had seen a couple of printers at work in that
recent visit to Japan, but when I tried to 'do it
at home', I just couldn't get it to work the way I
had seen it.
I now know that a large part of my trouble was
the pigments I was using. This print, for example,
is made with a pasty mess of watercolours from
tubes, completely the wrong type of pigment for the
kind of print I was trying to make. You can see the
white opaque layer sitting up on top of the paper,
instead of being driven down into it, like proper
transparent pigments would be.
The frustrations were growing ...
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