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).