We are looking at a hugely enlarged small
portion of a kuchi-e print from the Meiji
era, carved by 'just' another one of the
innumerable carvers of that era. These were men
like Egawa Tomekichi, the man whom Hokusai
specified to be the carver of his masterpiece '100
Views of Mount Fuji'- the same Hokusai who said of
work he planned to do "... everything I do, be it a
dot or a line, will be alive!" And indeed every dot
and line in this print is alive.
In defense of myself I have to point out that
this unknown carver and I have rather different
approaches to our work. He must have started out at
a very young age indeed, apprenticed to a strict
master, working long hours seven days a week with
time off only for festival days, and pretty much
living his life there at his carving bench. My life
is of course very different: I print as well as
carve, I don't work anywhere near the long hours he
did, I have never had a 'master' (strict or
otherwise!), and I spread my energies among many
other activities ...
So of course he was good! His world was very
narrow, but very deep indeed. Mine is the reverse
... wider than he could ever imagine, but as a
consequence, quite shallow everywhere.
But this sounds like I am making excuses for my
poor work. I'm not going to do that - I've been
working on prints for around twenty years now, and
even though I spend a lot of time with other
projects (the one I'm typing right now for
example!), twenty years should count for something!
I think we have to consider another reason for
the difference between my reproductions and those
spectacular old originals. And it is right there in
those two words - reproduction and
original - that we find it.
The carver of the original print worked from
what was known as the hanshita - a sheet of
very thin paper carrying the design and which was
pasted onto the block. This may have been drawn by
the artist himself, or more usually, by men in the
publishing houses who specialized in making these
'clear copies' from the original rough sketches.
But as skilled as these men were, it was not
possible for them to draw all the elements of the
design at the appropriately small scale. In many
cases (fine hair lines are a good example) they
would simply indicate the area where the
lines were to appear - the carver would take that
'hint' and cut the necessary lines in the wood
directly.
Repetitive patterns were treated the same way -
one portion would be shown in detail, and the
carver would know how to do the rest. Leaves on a
tree branch ... a scattering of small 'dots'
creating texture on a stone ... for all these
things the carver would consider the hanshita
simply as a general guide to where to put them.
The point I am trying to make is that the carver
was actually drawing the lines with his
knife - he was not reproducing them, and
there is a very very big difference between the
two.
Try this experiment for yourself: take a pen and
a sheet of paper and sign your name. No problem of
course, and the pen sweeps and curves smoothly
across the surface of the paper.
Now take a sheet of thin transparent paper, lay
it on top of your signature, and try and make a
'reproduction' of what you wrote the first time.
It simply cannot be done. You have two choices:
(1) slowly and carefully guide the pen over each
line, trying to make an exact reproduction. When
you have finished, and inspect the work, you will
find that though you may have been 'on the lines'
the result looks nothing at all like your signature
- it is stiff, wooden and lifeless.
"Every line is different - every
line is stupid - and the whole character has
changed ..."
(2) put your pen at the starting point, and
quickly 'do' your normal signature again. When you
have finished, you will find that although the
result now has similar 'life' to the original, the
position and details of all the lines has changed.
So it would seem that the proper way to make a
reproduction of a woodblock print would be to work
in the second method - not worrying too much about
the absolute position of each line and dot, but
simply trying to carve naturally. The resulting
print would vary somewhat from the original, but it
should have the same character.
That sounds like a nice idea ... but there is
one very large catch. Go back and play the
signature game again, but this time try and make
the reproduction of another person's
signature! Now which of the two methods will
you use? Neither one will work!
And this, of course, is the situation I face
with every stroke and line and dot of every
print I make. I must carve those same Hokusai
lines, Sukenobu lines, Hiroshige lines ... and do
it all with the same quick smoothness as the
original carver. This is no different at all from
the 'Mission Impossible' of the signature example I
gave ... no different at all.
So we see that to make a reproduction of a
woodblock print is actually impossible. Carvers
like myself are walking a very fine tightrope with
every stroke of the knife, trying to find a balance
between 'authenticity' (staying on the lines) and
'character' (carving living lines).
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