Sometimes one find oneself spoken through the words of other people
it is then one realises how universal is the particular.

In his autobiography, Graven Image, (which is at once both autobiography and treatise on wood engraving), John Farleigh reflects upon the first wood engraving that he made — a self-portrait ‘drawn’ (so to speak) not with pencil but directly into the wood with a graver. In the moment of that piece he realised that “the tool can be used as freely as a pencil” and that the act of engraving could be a creative process in its own right and not a mere “imitation of drawing.” It was an insight born of the freedom of the new, of abandon — a freedom that he lost when he found his subsequent work influenced by illustrations of woodcuts. “It took me” he writes, “a long time to recapture my first freedom.”

I am trying to recapture mine.

Over the past few months I have worked on a number of prints which I have not quite pulled off.  It has been a frustrating period.  I have thought carefully about design (though, and here’s the rub, at one and the same time too carefully and not carefully enough), made studies to explore the tones and textures that I can achieve with the gouge so as to realise what the mind’s eye sees, and pulled these studies together into ‘final’ pieces that were difficult to execute and which, to my mind, failed.

A case in point

My recent print The Book of Good Things, Verse 25, acts as memorial — in the sense both that it is a reminder of ‘good’ things and a record of things which, given the parlous state of our planet, may not be long for this world.  Having first conceived of the poem and cast it (biblically) in stone, my aim was then to accent the fragility of the natural world through creating a linocut that sited the stone not in a garden, but beneath a rising sea.  To do so, I felt the need to explore what I could acheive through different techniques.  The pictures above represent some of my attempts to realise my vision.  Reading left to right they show: a study of light falling through kelp; two studies in lettering; a rough proof of a ‘finished’ piece which pulls the other studies together.

Whilst the finished piece is reasonably well executed in terms of its cuts, it is a disappointment in many ways.  It fails as a composition (the stone needs a larger, less mean border or no border at all, and would be better sited left, not right, and angled rather than straight); it lacks movement (the bubbles and, perhaps, the kelp being the little that carry a sense of flow); finally, it is, all in all, too grey — a state which could perhaps be redeemed by working in more light, though that is a process which, for the moment I have little heart to engage in.  Better to leave it lie and call it learning.

Farleigh has something interesting to say on this too.

Artistic vision and technique, the eye and the hand, work at times in unison, and at other times the one outpaces the other.  Artists begin, Farleigh writes, in a state wherein “the craft ability” (what one can achieve technically) is greater than “the mental vision”.  This is a happy state in that what one wants to achieve is easily acheivable.  He demonstrates this with an illustration in which the hand represents technical ability and the eye, artistic vision.

Over time, artistic vision develops (guided in part by the hand) and a point is reached when what the artist sees and feels and wants to achieve, is in balance with the technical ability to realise the vision (shown in Farleigh’s illustration as the intersect of the two lines).  Everything goes swimmingly and the artist is endowed with fluency and a sense of power.  But then power inevitably begets inspiration, and as the vision continues to develop it “leaps ahead” of the artist’s technical ability such that technique acts as a drag upon progress (the shaded area in the illustration).  There follows, observes Farleigh, a “period of time, well known to most artists, of despair and difficulty. … technique can, from being more than adequate, become useless.”

Too true.

Like Farleigh, whose study of woodcuts turned him from his initial naive freedom, I have been drawn to the technique of others — primarily that of wood engravers of the 1930s such as Agnes Miller Parker, Claire Leighton, and Gwenda Morgan — and whilst I have gained much from their wonderful work, like Farleigh before me, I feel I have lost my initial freedom.

Through studying technique, I am able now to portray greys and a range of textures that were beyond me a year ago, but on the down side I have been drawn into a world of aching deliberation — a world far removed from It would make you weep, my first work. Carved from the barest of outlines and with no idea whatsoever of how I would manage the islands and sky in the piece, It would make you weep was poetic act.  An absorption in the moment.  I approached the block with abandon, in a spirit of experimentation, and had no real care over whether or not I would succeed in pulling a print, nor whether, in the end, the print would be worth pulling.  Doing what I could with limited technique, the eye and the hand met in a print that is stark black, naked white, bold movement.

I am unsure whether, in studying technique, my vision has (following Farleigh) now outpaced my hand, or whether my hand has outpaced and blinded my eye.  Technique is a means to an end, but it can also determine the end. It is perhaps for this reason that, in concluding his thoughts on the dance between vision and technique, Farleigh writes:

A new technique has to be developed by every artist for every phase of his mental progress.  The more personal the vision, the more personal the craft must become. 

And this is where I find myself now, seeking to make personal my craft.  Having read Farleigh, I realise that whilst the doubts that I have about my work are within me, they are also without. The particular — the personal — is, in its way, universal and the process that I find myself working through, rather than being unique to me, is one which art makes inevitable. I can only hope that, if I come to rework my sea swept stone, it is the hand’s sweep, its kiss and caress, the loose sketch and abandon that drives the gouge next.

John Farleigh’s Graven Image: an auto-biographical textbook (1940), Macmillan and Co. Ltd, London. A wonderful book to hold in the hand and one that can also be read online at the Internet Archive. His discussion of vision and technique can be found on pages 60-62, and his reflection on his first wood engraving on page 72.