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When Woodcuts Go Bad
I’ve been carving woodcuts for 15 years. I love the process of slowly chiseling away at the surface of a wood or linoleum block, cut by cut, watching as an image slowly takes shape. The effort is painstaking and requires total concentration. One poorly carved line can destroy hours of work and ruin an image. When it goes well, the work is meditative and mindful. When it goes wrong, interesting things happen.
One of the first portraits I carved was of an old college friend for his 30th birthday. Woodcutting cannot be rushed. If you hurry through a carving, results will look shoddy. I learned this the hard way. I rushed my friend’s portrait so I could give it to him as a birthday gift. When he viewed the image, he stared in shock. After several awkward seconds, he looked at me and said, “I thought we were friends.”
Another time I carved a portrait of my friend Conrad. He’d recently shaved his head so it was important to depict his cranium perfectly. In these early woodcut days, I’d not yet learned an important rule. Make sure the tools are sharp. I was using an old blade and sure enough, it slipped. This caused me to carve an inadvertent dent in Conrad’s head. Despite the flaw, he liked the image. He said it was…
