Carving Time
Every now and then, I indulge in my desire to know something that’s currently unknown to me for the thrill of a 50-50 chance of success or disaster. In a beginner’s mind, everything’s exciting and full of possibility. I approached my first attempt at linocut with this excitement. Of course you get punched by reality in the face real quick but still, like Emily says, I dwell in (some)possibility.
Even after pottery, I have this long standing, unsubstantiated belief that what looks easy to do, like linocut, would also be easy to execute by a beginner like me. I think my mom loved me too much and this has been the source of my annoying overconfidence at my hobbies. Or maybe it’s because I have this tendency to presume that my brain knowledge would translate easily to tactile/mechanical knowledge, which reality keeps telling me, “babe, that’s not how it goes at all”. This is an aquarius thing. Totally not my fault. But yes, ok – got it. Noted. Filed under: misconceptions about knowledge, evidence against overconfidence.
The process is long and tedious. Longer and more tedious than initially expected. But what I like about that, is you get to linger on the feeling of making things. I started with imagining the design of the print which is just a simple combination of leaves and a flower. This part of the process required me to think about positive and negative space in a completely new way. My brain noodles were really struggling at the first few attempts.
This is because everything I know about creating a graphic or a drawing is associated with positive space. I make a mark on a paper with ink and bam, that’s the image, that’s the drawing. Everytime I put a mark on paper, that’s the positive space, that’s the drawing. In linocut, to create the positive space, in this case, the flower, I don’t do anything on the space where the image of the flower lies. I have to carve out all the parts that’s NOT the flower to bring out the flower.
PRESENCE/ABSENCE CONUNDRUM
The action of carving is concentrated on the negative space in linocut. I carve out the negative space to create the flower. The process is just the opposite of how my brain interprets creating an image. Instead of working on the positive space to create the image, I need to work on the negative space the entire time. Carve out the absence to create the presence.
That’s just a complete mindfuck to me tbh.
After I have gotten over the “figuring out the image part”, the next thing was carving the block. Which is my favorite part. This is the longest part of the entire adventure. To participate in this creative madness called linocut printing one must truly carve out time – it took me over an hour. It was not easy. It was fun though. Again, a different mode than what I am used to (sketch-in-10-minute-and-off-to-my-daily-grind mode).
The tactile connection with the material, the understanding of: if I put this pressure on the block, I get this result – Or if I do this, then that. The instant feedback loop, the making of many mistakes and playing around it – this back and forth of discovery and finding the next appropriate action is satisfying. There’s something delicious about materiality.
