I recently made a small drawing in my journal of a tree that is comprised of one continuous line made without lifting the pencil from the paper. In part, the drawing was a means of exploring how I might frame ‘The Happy Tree’ that I have been working on through various prints. It was also a study in connectedness. The trunk, roots, canopy of The Happy Tree are all formed from the one continuous line, as too are the trees which grow from and into its roots and the clouds and sun which grow from the canopy of those trees. A bird which sits in the tree is part of the same line, as is a fish which swims through the sky. The drawing measures seven by seven centimetres (roughly two and a half inches across). I was taken with its form and simplicity and decided then to make a linocut from it. Whilst seemingly simple in appearance, the linocut is proving the most challenging I have carved to date.

I scaled the drawing to 16 by 16 centimetres (6 inches across) by taking a photo of it and then printing the photo using an inkjet home printer. I then played around with line to interweave text amongst the roots. It was then that the phrase ‘all things were one thing’ came to me and I decided to lay this line on the surface of the ground as though the peaks and troughs of the script were grass growing from the soil. Happy with the overall effect, I copied the drawing to tracing paper and then reversed it onto a small block of grey lino.

The piece is unusual for me in that rather than interpreting the drawing on the block and changing things as I go, which is my usual practice, I am simply cutting around the line that I have transferred to the block. I use a very fine v-shaped gouge to cut the line (a Pfeil 12/1) and in doing so I am very conscious to avoid cutting into and across the line. It is a challenge not only in respect to carving the script (which being handwritten is full of curves and in some instances is only five millimetres high), but across the whole mass of intersecting lines which constitute the piece. I have spent something in the order of two full days working on the carving to date and still have quite some way to go.

In general in my work, I work the gouge top down — cutting a mark and then the mark beneath. When it comes to curves, I cut the inside line of the curve first and then the outside. For example, when cutting the ‘o’ in the word ‘one’ in the picture below, I cut the inside of the letter and then the outside. In this way, if I cut too close to the line with the gouge and eat into the line, there is room on the outside for me to widen the line by cutting further away from its edge. The practice works, but gets more challenging the finer the detail, the tighter the curve and the less the room for the gouge to manoeuvre. In this piece, I find it the more challenging still in that it is a mass of conjoined lines and thus what appears as the inside of one line is also the outside of another. There is little room for error and no remedy when a line is cut through other than to remove that line. It is, therefore, achingly slow work.