Woodcut Prints

I had a little dabble in the medium of woodcut print making last week. Using two offcuts of 12mm ply that I found near a building site and one of those 99 pence, red plastic cutting tools, I made this three-tone image of Chris Norton Walker. I love the roughness of it all; the visible grain of the cheap wood, the choppy texture of the edges. Woodcut prints involve long periods of concentration and mistakes can set you way back, sometimes as far as square one. Therefore, when you embark on making one, it feels like gambling a large amount of labour on the outcome. Get it right and you've got a block that you can take images from over and over again. Get it wrong and you lament the lost hours with the bitterness and disdain of an eBay user whose just been outbid at the last second.

I guess the zen approach would be to look at the process with the cool-headed mindset of an investment manager, average out the cost of cutting your blocks (including the never-to-be-printed failures) against the beauty and entertainment gained from the successes. So, considering this is the only woodcut I've ever done that I'm happy to show people, I guess this A4 sized image took me about 34 hours of labour! Maybe averaging doesn't help.