Completed Mergansers and Grebes Woodcut

Mergansers and Grebes on the Schuylkill River. Multi-block Reduction Woodcut by Ken Januski.

Done! Though inevitably as I print what should be the last state of a print I start thinking, 'Well I could do that or I could add this.' But Sometimes you just have to stop and save any new thoughts for a new print.

This is an edition of 15. The entire print is 9x11 inches and the image itself is 6x8 inches. I used Daniel Smith water soluble relief inks on Shin Torinoko paper from McClains. I had read that this paper, reasonably priced, was also good for use with multiple blocks. Since I knew I'd be using both reduction woodcut and multiple wood blocks it seemed like a good choice. And I have to say that it's held up well.

I'm quite happy I pursued this, especially the 5-6 abstract shapes that constituted the first image that I printed, way back when. They force this print out of the category of something you might actually see, I think, into the category of evoking something you might experience.

As returning readers well know I have a thing about photography. I doubt that it's far removed from the notion, apocryphal or not, that photographs steal your soul. To me they are always so much less that what I've seen and experienced.

I guess that's why I've always loved art. But wildlife art seems to be joined at the hip to photography. Numerous artists have complained about this but photographic wildlife art still seems to completely overwhelm any other type of wildlife art.

So since the day I started bird art, almost eight years ago now, I've wanted to create a type of art that is both naturalistic, in the sense that there is some sort of truth to the birds and other fauna and flora portrayed but that is also artistic, that is not limited by verisimilitude. A well known wildlife artist once questioned online my notion that artists can know too much. But surely they can, just like muscle bound athletes are limited. Knowledge is in the service of art and not the other way round.

In any case I found a few years ago that relief printmaking seemed to offer a way to combine naturalism and art. But I also found that I was still getting a little closer to photographic representation than I liked, even if it was fairly expressionistic.

So this print is really the first to really break out of that. The geometric shapes put a stumbling block in the way of representation, deliberately. In my mind they have served well in forcing me to keep this print about art, as well as about representation. All in all I'm quite happy with the results and hope that this will be a fruitful path to pursue. I'm pretty confident that it will.

That's a Different Print, Right?

Mergansers and Grebes on Schuylkill River. First State of Multi-block Reduction Woodcut on good paper by Ken Januski.

I debated showing this and I might very well be sorry that I did once I try to incorporate it into the mergansers and grebes print. Yes this is part of the same print. Not only that but this is printed on the good paper, not proofing paper. There's no going back now.

All along I've wanted to break up the traditional pictorial space. This is nothing new of course since it's been going on for at least 100 years since Cubism or perhaps earlier. But I just felt like I needed to do something to get to a different type of bird/wildlife art, at least a different type for myself.

It's not unusual to see abstraction in bird sculpture but it seems pretty rare in bird painting. The only artists I know that seem comfortable with it, or at least with trying it, are British.

I've debated doing something like this for quite awhile. In fact I've started off paintings abstractly only to veer back toward realism at the end. But that can't very well happen here.

So in the coming days I'll start printing the two other blocks on top of this. Though it probably doesn't look it there is some rhyme and reason to these shapes, their color and their location. The orange triangle should intersect the bill of the female Common Mergansers. The small yellow square at top left should intersect the bill of the Red-necked Grebe. The two browns should intersect the neck and head of the female Common Merganser and the neck of the Red-necked Grebe.

Since they are printed first they'll go under the two other blocks with their separate shapes and colors. But I may feel the need to print all of these shapes, some of these shapes, or just parts of some shapes on top of the colors from the next two blocks if I don't like what I get.

This is truly improvisatory. Many printmakers, again primarily British when it comes to bird art, use monotypes as their main outlet for improvisation. And surely you can get improvisation that way. But you also get just one print, the mono of monoprint. I'd like to get more than one print. In fact I'd like an edition of prints that still is largely improvisatory.

It will be a great surprise when I start printing the other colors. And I think it's more likely that I'll fail than that I'll succeed. But it's something that I've felt  I needed to try for a long time. We'll see what happens.