A Pileated Moku Hanga

Pileated Woodpecker at Flat Rock Dam moku hanga. Copyright 2023 by Ken Januski.

Soon after I finished my last moku hanga, at the end of January, 2023 I believe, I started thinking about a new print. Since nothing sprang to mind I started going through all of my old sketchbooks and came up with six to eight images that I thought had possibilities. Often they were based on something I'd seen while out birding. And before you knew it I went out birding and found something new that might work as the idea for a new print.

Pencil compositional sketch of Pleated, Buffleheads, Common Merganser and Flat Rock Dam. Copyright 2023 by Ken Januski.

What I first saw were two Bufflehead and one male Common Merganser just above Flat Rock Dam on the Schuylkill River near where I live in Philadelphia. As I looked at them in the distance though I heard a Pileated Woodpecker calling behind me. I didn't look for it though, instead concentrating the waterfowl. My guess is that I was trying to see them well enough to get a mental image that I could then use as a subject for.a memory sketch/field sketch. I don't seem to have any so my guess is that they were just too far away and instead I concentrated on taking photos, even though neither are rare birds.

Finally they flew off and so I turned around to look for the Pileated, which was no longer calling and which I assume had flown off. But no, there he was at the top of a distant snag. Of course once I saw him he flew off. He was not the first I've seen along the Schuylkill. BUT they are the first I've seen there  in over 25 years! A few weeks earlier I'd seen one flying over the Schuylkill, hugging the shore as he flew. It was just such an odd sight. I'm much more used to seeing them deep in forests! 

Pencil studies of Pileateds from my photos. Copyright 2023 by Ken Januski.

Pencil studies of Pileateds from my photos. Copyright 2023 by Ken Januski.

Pencil studies of Pileateds from my photos. Copyright 2023 by Ken Januski.

Pencil compositional sketch of Pleated, Buffleheads, Common Merganser and Flat Rock Dam. Copyright 2023 by Ken Januski.

In any case I started toying with idea of using the waterfowl and Pileated as the subject of my next print.  Though I know Pileateds well I know them to ID, not to draw. Drawing or painting them, even when highly abstracted, requires more complete knowledge. So I did a number of studies from my photos which are above.

I also kept working on a sketch of the entire print. One of the main decisions I made was to make the entire picture one seen from behind the Pileated, looking down on the Pileated, the Schuylkill and the waterfowl in it

Digital compositional and color study using Procreate on iPad. Copyright 2023 by Ken Januski.

Recently I've found myself developing compositional studies on my iPad using Procreate. A stylus is incredibly limited compared to a pen or pencil or paint brush. But used in conjunction with Procreate it is an incredibly quick way of sorting through, and modifying, different ideas for a print or painting. I"m sure it is limiting in ways I don't know about, leading me to make decisions based on the medium itself rather than the idea I would have without these digital tools. But right now I'm not worried about it.

Once I started the print, and the eight wood blocks I used to create it I didn't look back at the digital version. At that point the medium in front of me took over: watercolor, or watered down gouache and Japanese printmaking paper, washi. It is such a beautiful medium that only a masochist would ignore it and let the digital version be his guiding light as to where to take the print.

All 24 prints of the Pileated at Flat Rock Dam moku hanga. Copyright 2023 by Ken Januski

I have to say it is still bizarre to think of myself as a printmaker and to think in terms of editions. I've always been a one-off painter. You only make one of a thing. All the effort goes into the final product. You don't spend anytime thinking about what you need to do to be able to reproduce an identical image more than once. It has driven me nuts. Until I sell a print made 5-10 years ago. At that point I'm glad I've taken the time and made the effort to print an edition.  And for those who don't know there is no printing press involved. I am the printing press, along with my baren. My guess is that it is far easier to make identical prints, without blemishes and mistakes, using a printing press  than it is the way I do it with a hand held baren. And I have ruined many, many, many prints by some errant sloppiness or lack of focus that can occur when doing all printing by hand, with no mechanical help.

That is why I now tend to show photos of the entire printed edition. It was so much work and it is such an accomplishment!! It also helps explain why moku hanga often is, and always should be, more expensive. There is just so much more work involved and so much greater risk of failure.

My old oil-based reduction linocuts and woodcuts were also full of risk and they were also printed by hand. I've never owned a press. But one of the additional appeals of moku hanga is that it seems to encourage a slower, less frantic pace, regardless. of complexity and possibility of failure. It seems to encourage a more human pace of production that does reduction printmaking. I'm starting to be experienced enough with it to be able to proceed at a saner and more human pace. Perhaps with time this would have also happened if I'd continued with reduction prints using traditional methods. But I doubt it would have ever gotten to the point I have with moku hanga.

A somewhat calm printmaker: something I never at all envisioned or desired and yet here I am, and very content with it.

The new print will be for sale in my Etsy store sometime about mid-May.

 

Pick Your Poison: Reduction Cuts versus Moku Hanga

Proof of Eastern Amberwing Moku Hanga. Copyright 2020 by Ken Januski.

Multi-block woodcut of Blackpoll Warblers among Swamp Dogwood,  Copyright 2014 by Ken Januski.

This will be a very short post. I decided to write it after I took a look at my Etsy shop's stats for  last year and saw that the Blackpoll Warblers among Swamp Dogwood was by far the most viewed work  for 2019. But no sales.

It reminded  me of just how difficult it is to make any sense out of  web stats. It also reminded me of Robert Gillmor saying in 'Cutting Away' that he could never tell which prints would be popular. That is my experience. The ones that I think will be popular, largely often because I think that they are just plain good, often are not. Throwaways, in the sense that I did them relatively  quickly, are more popular than I would  have guessed. So as usual I just do what I like  and assume that my work will eventually find an  audience.

But the reduction part of the Blackpoll Warblers also  reminded me of  the blood, sweat and tears, and at one time volatile fumes as well, that accompany them. Though there was always something thrilling about doing them I eventually gave it up. I didn't find the mental wear and tear, coupled with piles and piles of print that had to be rejected as I made more changes, were worth  it. Surely there must be a better way.

For me that is moku hanga, as seen in a recent proof of an Eastern Amberwing.  There is still a fair amount to  do  and  I need to switch to at least one and perhaps two better papers for  the edition.

Why you might ask do I so prefer one over  the other? Well I'm sure that there are different answers for different people and I should also add that I don't really do traditional moku hanga. But I think the most telling  word is  this: organic. Everything about moku hanga seems organic: the materials used, the method of printing,  the many slow, at least for me, processes that make up moku  hanga.

In both reduction prints and in moku hanga, especially as I continue to  add blocks of new colors, it can seem like trying to juggle too many balls at the same time. With reduction cuts I was exhausted by the time I was done. Moku hanga can proceed at a much calmer pace, though of course this wasn't true  when it was done in its heyday in Japan I imagine since it was a business. But for me the lack of solvents, the ease of  printing, even though I recall that my first print proved no easier and probably harder than my first reduction print, the small space required to both carve and print all make it something that fits easily into my life. In many ways  it seems organic.

I say 'pick your poison'  in the title because the difficulty of both can make  them both occasionally seem like two unpleasant choices. But they both can create wonderful prints. The difference  I guess is that moku hang always seems to carry its own antidote  to the poison. Just sit back and take your time.

A Finished Reduction Linocut

Falling, Fighting Blue-gray Gnatcatchers. Two-block Reduction Linocut by Ken Januski.

This two-block reduction woodcut is finally finished. I'd guess it took about three months altogether, with many interruptions for allowing the ink to dry and other things. The main delay though was compositional decision-making.

I often see prints, in all media, that obviously take a lot of time to complete either due to a wealth of detail, technical complexity or something else. This type of print is generally unimpressive to me. As I've said many times in the years I've been writing this blog I'm not impressed by work in and of itself. That seems a very puritanical way of appreciating art.

But I'm sure another perspective is that time spent on compositional decision-making is just as off-putting to others. That may well be. And it may also be that many people looking at the print above won't realize how much time was spent deciding on colors, shapes, which colors on which shapes.

I've had the good luck to sell quite a few prints over the last month. They've been in a variety of styles, some more primitive, some more realistic and some more abstract. In general I'd say that the prints I've sold most of over the last years have been simple and direct, often almost primitive. When I package them off for shipment I feel some kinship with the people who buy them. And I wonder if I shouldn't stick to this more simple and direct style.

On the other hand I come from a tradition, particularly in my abstract work, of worrying over a painting or print until it is just right. Matisse said that every shape, every color, every brushstroke had its place. And it's something I'm very sympathetic to. One reason for this I think is that such work rewards viewing over the years. There is always something more to find and appreciate.

So when I do more compositionally complex prints that is the main motivation. I want a print that sticks with you.

The other thing that I think really delayed this print, and most compositionally complex prints, is that I know that I'm not making just one print. I'm making many. That is the nature of a print. You make more than one. So I figure if I'm going to be making 15, 20, 25, 30 prints I want them to be good enough that someone might want to buy them, even years after I've made them.

Solitary Sandpiper and Twelve-spotted Skimmer. Linocut by Ken Januski.

I was reminded of that when I sold the 2012 print pictured above. So much work goes into a print, into being careful to print them in such a way that they are as identical as possible, to avoid ink smudges that ruin the print. And yet most don't sell when made and just go into storage(a separate complication). But the reward is to be able to pull one out years afterwards, be reminded of how much you like it, and send it off to a buyer.

Because I know that I've already spent hours on the print, and that I'll be spending more hours printing an edition, I want to make sure that the composition is as good as I can make it before I print.

Thus the three months making the gnatcatcher print.

Since I've not made many prints this year I haven't written much about printmaking. But I have been thinking about it. One type of print that I often like is the monoprint. I like it because it is very spontaneous, and more like a painting than a print. But I've never made one. Why? Because I don't see the point of just making one. I might as well paint as print just one(thus monoprint). Still I very much like what many people do with monoprints.

In many of my prints I'm actually trying to create a multi-print monoprint. What I mean by that is that I hope to capture the feeling of spontaneity that a monoprint has. And yet still make an edition of it. I think that this gnatcatcher print may capture that better than any print I've yet done.

Still it is a far cry from my simple and direct prints. My guess is that I'll continue to find a place for both styles.

Dead Common Yellowthroat. Pencil and Watercolor Sketch by Ken Januski.

We have one outdoor cat. But because I'm seriously allergic to them we've set a limit as to how many we can have inside. So our outdoor cat, who my wife adores and I have to say I like, causes far more problems with local birds than I'd like. In fact we've drastically cut down our bird feeding so that we don't attract birds that in turn might end up as prey for the cat. We do pretty well but recently he got our first backyard migrating warbler of the late summer. It's a very sad event. The best I can  do is to make a quick sketch of the bird, in this case a Common Yellowthroat. It is amazing what small, delicate creatures they are.

Pectoral Sandpiper. Watercolor by Ken Januski.

A slightly less delicate creature, though I can't say for sure since I didn't hold him in my hand, was this Pectoral Sandpiper. I had committed to bird and try to sketch shorebirds for World Shorebird Day. But I said I would do so nearby in locations that sometimes but certainly not always have shorebirds. Over four days I found none in very local locations and only a few further away at Heinz NWR. Those were too distant to sketch. So instead I did this watercolor of a Pectoral Sandpiper, seen and photographed at Morris Arboretum last fall.

I still greatly enjoy watercolor and it is no longer the sheer torture it was when I started. I like going back and forth between it and printmaking. But I think printmaking will remain my primary medium.

Finito!

I've just finished the linoleum block reduction print of a Blackburnian Warbler seen at Magee Marsh in Ohio in May, 2011. This print has been an ordeal, using 8 or maybe 9 or maybe even 10 colors. But in terms of color it's pretty much what I wanted.

In terms of registration well maybe not. Without a sophisticated registration system, and perhaps even with one, a print with 8 to 10 colors might not have the best registration. Still it's probably better than your average newspaper! The difference is that I don't care all that much.

I don't want total chaos but I do like the happy accidents and forced inexactitude that many colors creates. This could easily sound like an after the fact rationalization. But it's not. I just don't like finely done art, at least not from my own hand. I can admire it in the work of others. But for myself I start shaking when I verge to close to exactness. It's just not my character.

When I was a child I read something that said Native American artists(Indians in the lingo of the time) often left a mistake in their crafts because something that was perfect was a challenge to the gods or something like that. I'm sure I'm misremembering it. But it stuck with me. Who knows whether it had any influence on my aesthetics. I doubt it. But it is funny how I think about it as I verge away from anything that is too finely done.

I'm not sure how many readers are familiar with reduction linoleum block prints. What it means is that as you print one color you carve it away from the block after printing. By the time you're done there's almost nothing left to the block. The photo above shows what's left in the final inking. I'm getting fancy here and using two colors, the final green and a new orange for the throat. The smudges on the block are where the inking brayer tilted and got ink where I didn't want it. So I rubbed that area off before printing.

The final edition of this is 12, with 4 artist's proofs. They are nearly the same as the final edition. Because of the complex registration each print is really almost unique. The paper is 9x11 inches and the image itself is 6x8. I've used Gamblin oil-based ink and hand pulled each print on Rives Heavyweight paper. Eventually one or two will go up for sale on my Etsy site.

Blackburnian Warbler Version 6

Finally getting near the end here. And my guess is that I'll finish it before Congress raises the debt ceiling, if in fact it decides that's a better option than the full blown recession that seems heading our way.

Oddly enough for all the transmogrifications this print has gone through it's starting to look much as I'd planned. The vague idea is taking shape. I still plan to add a bright orange to just the throat and then replace much of the black in the foliage with green. Whether it will be a tinted green, as i'd originally planned, a medium leaf green, or a darker gray/green only time and experimentation will tell.

I do want to add that last fall I wrote a post on what I expected the November elections would bring: they would have the impact, and not a good one, of a mighty oak falling in the forest and destroying all that surrounds it. This was based on seeing just such a thing at Carpenter's Woods. That seems to be exactly what we've gotten. You get what you elect.

Where Did This Patience Come From?

I've never been a patient person. But as with most people age and experience has shown me that sometimes it pays to at least try to be patient.

In art it's easy to feel like I want the results now. I want that extremely vague idea in the back of my head to immediately appear as a finished masterpiece as soon as I begin a new work. I know some people like to work more slowly and almost meditatively. There's something appealing in the process of working itself, not just in the finished result.

I understand the second camp but I'm more with the impatient artists I'd say. Still I've learned that good work generally doesn't work that way. It is like true conversation. You have to look and listen to what the work is telling you. I know this might sound hopelessly mystical and nonsensical to non-artists. But really it's no different that a major league shortstop fielding a hard hit ball in an unfamiliar ballpark. The shortstop doesn't just methodically catch the ball, knowing exactly where it will go once it leaves the batter's bat. All sorts of odd things happen along the way. You need to stay alert.

The same is true in art. You need to stay alert and sometimes you have to take a lengthy road to get to your goal.

That's the case with reduction linocuts. When I began this print I anticipated six colors, a light orange, bright orange, yellow-green, blue, black and green. A light gray and dark burgundy were also possible for small accents.

As you can imagine printing at least six colors means a lot more work. So my thought is: if I'm going to make such a complex print I might as well make a large edition, assuming of course that the end result will be successful. So that adds more work. For this print I've done about 30 proofs and 18 actual prints. Each proof and print must be properly registered so that the various colors match up. For instance I don't want the black of the limb mistakenly appearing on the white of the birds breast because of sloppy registration.

So you can probably see this is time consuming. It comes as a great surprise to me, an impatient person, that I have the patience to go along with this lengthy process.

I printed the fourth color yesterday, as seen in the photo above. I'd have to say this was sloppy thinking on my part. I was looking for a grayish white that would show the whitish breast in shadow, but I also wanted a gray for some of the more distant limbs. Instead I got a very, dark gray, far darker than I'd anticipated. BUT there was something I liked about the strong contrast it created with the other colors.

Today though I realized that it was just too untrue to the breast of the Blackburnian warbler, even in the darkest shadow. So today I mixed up a largely transparent white. I inked just the breast and printed a proof. I wasn't thrilled with that so I inked the entire linoleum block, knowing that I could always print over areas that I didn't want to be white in the finished print. That looked far worse. So finally I went with the white in just one area, as shown at top.

There's one problem with that. It looks a bit ugly. Most of this is due, I think, to the fact that it is a loosely defined area. I know however that I'm planning to print the black breast streaking of the bird in that area. My hope, is that once the black is printed the breast will also look crisp.

But now I've done five colors and I foresee at least three more: black, bright orange and some sort of green. I'll probably determine that once I print the black. This means at least three more days work.

Where in the world did I get the sort of patience that allows me to spend over a week on a print? I'm not really sure. My guess is that it's a matter of hope springing eternal. Somewhere in the back of my mind I think the results will be worth the work.

If you wonder why, though, I don't do more reduction linocuts, I think you now have your answer.

Things to Do in 100 F Weather

Like much of the US we're going through some triple digit weather. Since we don't have air conditioning, and don't really want it, anywhere except the bedroom it tends to get a bit hot on days that are over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

But this is when a basement printing setup pays off. It's always a lot cooler in the basement and that's where I do my actual printing. So I look at the print and do the carving in my blazingly hot studio on the second floor. But then when I go to print it's cool. So I've spent the last three days working on this new reduction printn

It's based on a watercolor sketch I showed back in May or so of a Blackburnian I'd seeb at Magee Marsh in early May. Reduction prints are somewhat like a leap of faith. The 'faith' is in your ability to make the whole thing work. Maybe some people can clearly plan out the 5-10 colors that might be used in a reduction cut. But not me, and not most people I'd guess. I come up with a vague plan but then I base most of my further decisions on the proofs that I pull as I go along.

This proof has gone through three colors plus the white of the paper. You can still see some of the orange that was the first color. That was followed by the light blue, then the light yellow. I still plan on 3-5 more colors and the print might dictate still more. As I go along my faith is in my ability to react to what happens and still come up with something I'm happy with.

I'd guess another 3-5 days on this print, perhaps more.

Though it seemed accurate the neck on the juvenile white ibis that I showed a week or so ago seemed a bit thick. Some recent photos by others of the same bird at John Heinz NWR in Philadelphia that I happened upon on the web also showed how the neck can seem very thick when held a certain way.

But the neck can also look slimmer. I also felt like that watercolor didn't adequately show the variation in neck color. So above is a second watercolor of same bird, this time looking slimmer and doing a better job with the neck coloration I think.

I had no plans at all to do a lino of it. But as I've been working on the new lino..............

End of the Wood Ducks Reduction Linocut

This seems like it's been a long haul. But I finally printed the final edition of 16 of the Wood Ducks seen along the Wissahickon this summer. There are a total of 5 colors in this reduction linocut.

By the time I got to the last color, the light blue, I found it hard to roll on the ink without getting it into areas I didn't want. That's because 95% of the block had been cut away. So there were only a few small areas to ink. Even with a small roller that I applied to each of the areas that needed to be inked some of it migrated elsewhere. This also was a surprise because those areas had been cut really deep, I thought deep enough that I wouldn't have to worry about the roller touching them.

All in all I'm happy with this though. It's taken some liberties but that's one reason I like linocut. It lends itself to taking liberties, to abstracting, to creating a higher contrast than might actually be seen. Not everyone of course uses this medium in that way. Robert Gillmor for instance is much more precise, as is Andrea Rich in her woodcuts. And yet I think both also tend to use the higher contrast that seems so natural to these media. Linocut and woodcut seem like the perfect blend of realism and abstraction.

The print is on Rives BFK paper, 9x11 for the full print, and 6x8 for the image itself. It is an edition of 16, printed with Gamblin oil-based inks.

Trust Your Intuition?

Though accepted wisdom in reduction linocuts is to print the lighter colors first I had some misgivings about this when I printed color number two of this Wood Duck linocut. I was somewhat afraid that I might lose some of the dark defining lines that were there if I used a lighter color second.

I've spent the last two days experimenting with color number three and cutting away more linoleum. Though there is a lot that I like about its current state at top, I do think I've lost some of those defining lines. So it's gotten harder to tell one duck from another. It's becoming harder to read though maybe more striking as just an abstract design of shape, value and color.

As I add colors problems of registration also become more apparent. I use a rough and ready system that has worked well enough so far. But it's not a finely tuned system. The original image I posted here showed some registration problems. I hadn't seen them when I chose it to photograph. But most of the prints are better so I've substituted the more successful one now at the top of this post.

One additional problem with reduction prints is that a lot of areas are now cut away. There is no way that I can go back in and add defining lines, well outside of carving a second block that is. All that's left to work with is the remaining uncut linoleum.

As far as the third color goes I spent a very long time testing before I finally decided on this one. The main problem was that blue or green looked better but brown was truer to reality. Eventually I ended up with this compromise.

Still to come are a dark blue/black for shadows and dark parts of the ducks, and possibly for the water and rocks under the water to the left, as well as a lighter blue for a few highlights, especially for the speculum, of the ducks. But only time will tell what colors actually make it into the print.

Continuing Down the Printmaking Trail

Thanksgiving's passed and linocuts continue their siren call. As I think I said in my first post on linocuts I haven't done any printmaking in over 30 years, outside of a brief time when I taught etching about 25 years ago. So no printmaking of any time in over 25 years.

But now that I'm back working on a new print I remember printmakings addictive qualities. I'm sure not everyone would agree with this. Some people don't have the patience for it. You don't see your results as you work as with most other media. You can't see the results until you ink up your work and print it on paper, either manually or using a press.

Normally I'm not a patient artist. But for me the need for patience is outweighed by the element of surprise. I'm sure that there are some printmakers who can visualize every mark they make and know how it will look when it prints. But my guess is that most printmakers don't. I probably shouldn't say what most printmakers do or don't do though, since I don't know any and haven't for years. But for me there is always a great element of surprise in printmaking. I never know what the changes I've made to the plate/block will look like until I pull a print. I love this. There is a sense of having a dialog, a give and take, with your materials. There is always the element of surprise.

Another appeal of woodblock printing and linoleum block printing is that it lends itself to high contrast patterns. If you want you can emphasize every gouge mark you make. Though I work in many ways, and can appreciate many styles of work, I think that high contrast is something that comes natural to me. And pattern does as well.

This makes for bright and bold, some might say garish, work. Since I often work that way anyway it's nice to work in a medium that encourages it.

And finally, to end my list of appealing things about printmaking, all of the extra work that goes into it pays off in multiple prints. A print is normally not one of a kind. You can print as many as you'd like. And, if you're at all concerned about the cost of your work being prohibitively high to some people, multiple prints allow you to offer each one at a lower price. All of this is appealing to me.

It is untrue however that I can print as many as I'd like of the print at top, an immature Yellow-crowned Night Heron that I saw this summer. I posted watercolors of it this summer. The reason I can't make innumerable prints here is that I've used 'reduction printing.' I've never tried this before. As far as I can tell the proper way to do it is to print each color separately, carving out that area once it's been printed. But once you've done that the first color is gone. You can no longer go back and print more copies of it.

So for this one I printed eight copies of the print using yellow ink. The areas that I had carved out before inking the block with yellow ink printed as white or the color of the paper. But the next step was to print in black. So I started carving out the areas that I wanted to stay yellow, the color of the paper, or both. I'm part way through that process now. I've run out of black ink so am waiting for a new shipment before I continue.

But I'll never be able to do more than eight prints. That's because I can never go back to the yellow portion of the linoleum block. It's been carved away. This is a rough summary of a technique I've never used before. So take it with a grain of salt. I think it's accurate. Certainly it's accurate about what I've done. Maybe in a year or so I'll be able to talk more authoritatively.

Stay tuned for the completion of this print. The next challenge will be to register the paper properly. When I'm happy with what the black portion looks like I'll ink up the block with black ink, put down each of the sheets that have already been printed in yellow and try to get them registered correctly. Then we'll see what we'll see.