Running To and From Craft

Least and Solitary Sandpipers Mokuhanga. Mokuhanga print on Nishinouch paper.  Copyright 2024 by Ken Januski

Earlier this month I watched a nearly 5 hour long video on Youtube of David Bull with Taran Casey showing the live process from start to finish of a producing a mokuhanga. The focus, or multi-focus since there was a camera on each of them, was on carving. Though I think some people may be able to make mokuhanga prints without much carving for many people, including myself, it is perhaps the most important part.

And yet, for the mokuhanga prints from  the Edo period, i.e. the ukiyo-e prints that are so famous, the artist was not the carver. The artist made the original sketch but there was also a carver, a printer and a publisher. I should add that I'm not at all an expert in any of this. But I don't think anything I'm saying is incorrect. But the carver was a professional carver just as the printer was a professional printer. Today with rare exceptions an artist making mokuhanga assumes all four roles. And he almost never is a professional carver!

If you look at prints from that time, especially original prints, you have to throw up your hands in surrender. You can never be as good as those carvers! Especially if you're also the artist, the printer and the publisher. But you can't help but admire them and learn from them.

In watching this video I did realize how incredibly much I have to learn about carving. The problem for me is that I'm not willing to devote the amount of time necessary to carve that well! There are too many other parts of art that are important to me. And yet I place great value on line in my prints and I hate to see the sinuous line of the drawing/painting that formed the basis of my idea for the print replaced by the choppy line of my poor, but greatly improved, carving!! There are parts of the drawing below, mainly the thin quick lines, that I cannot currently carve successfully. That makes it impossible for me to take up certain of my drawn and painted work as a subject for my mokuhanga, at least at the moment.

White-crowned Sparrow. Sumi brushpen and wash sketch. Copyright 2024 by Ken Januski.

 

Thinking about craft reminded me of the similarity with my other artistic interest: birds. Though my artistic training is all in the fine arts, not in illustration, and in abstract art not representational art or wildlife art I now find myself making art that includes wildlife, especially birds, as its subject. As such I've looked at a lot of wildlife art, much of which leaves me quite cold, but much of which I also have to admire for its understanding of its subject. In other words I think there is also a craft to wildlife art, in the sense that it seems somewhat necessary to have some idea how birds in general and individual birds specifically are constructed. There is a  certain knowledge and expertise involved in portraying birds or animals in a recognizable if not wholly realistic way. I admire artists who can do so, especially if their subjects retain a sense of life! I don't want to work that way or emulate them, but I do admire them.

So all in all I find myself both feeling a need to learn a craft, to run towards it, but also a need to avoid it at all costs, so that I don't get lost in knowledge and technique at the expense of art.

Or, as Delacroix says in his journal which I'm currently rereading: "But when something bores you leave it alone. Never seek after an empty perfection. Some faults, some things which the vulgar call faults, often give vitality to a work.”

It is so easy to go for an 'empty perfection.' To me that is about the worst artistic sin. On the other hand, as the recent video reminded me, it is also important to pay attention to craft. I wasn't trained to pay any attention to craft and I probably would have rebelled against it if I had been. But as I've made art over the years I've come to realize that 'craft' really is just the wisdom of earlier practitioners of the art I make, even if it differs stylistically. I hope to be able to use it more and more, but I also think that my 'vulgar faults' will probably always be with me and not be something I'm embarrassed by. I don't aspire to 'vulgar and vital' but it is always preferable to anything that also lacks vitality!

Titian Probably Never Knew How He Was Going to Finish A Picture

American Goldfinch on Thistle. Proof of Multi-block Woodcut by Ken Januski.

American Goldfinch on Thistle. Later Stage of Multi-block Woodcut by Ken Januski.

Titian probably never knew how he was going to finish a picture, and Rembrandt must often have been in the same state. His extravagantly vigorous brushstrokes were less the result of planned execution than of feeling his way with repeated touches.

Eugene Delacroix, The Journal of Eugene Delacroix, translated by Hubert Wellington, published by Phaidon Press, entry for November 3, 1850.

I continue to reread The Journal of Eugene Delacroix and can't resist quoting much of what Delacroix has written. Sometimes it's directly relevant to the artwork I'm showing and sometimes not. Today I think it is pretty relevant, at least in the sense that I'm feeling my way with this print. I find this is the way that I work most often.

You can set up a skeletal framework to start a painting or print, but in the end you need to have a dialog with your medium, sometimes giving it its way and ending up in surprising places.  I know that there are artists who plan out everything, and supposedly Alfred Hitchcock was the epitome of this in film, but I think most successful artists stay open enough as they proceed to veer off in a slightly different direction if they see that the opportunity arises and probably will offer a better result.

In the case of Titian and Rembrandt they are of course feeling their way in more representational work than mine. And they are using brushes not chisels and wood. But there is a great similarity in the sense that I really don't at all know how this print will end. I don't know how I'll finish it.

At top the black block is printed on top of a proof with the three colors that I've printed so far: yellow, rose and olive/brown. Beneath it is the actual print with those three colors. As I move on to the final colors I'd like to have a better idea of what the black will look like. But I don't want it covering everything as it does in top print. So I'm going to need to feel my way along, removing more and more of the black woodblock and proofing it. The danger, and one I'm well aware of from past experience, is that I'll remove too much black. That's why I've removed so little up until now.

But it is time to start removing it. I'll be feeling my way with repeated carvings.