The Ponte Vecchio (Florence) Mirrored in the Rippling Arno

The Ponte Vecchio Mirrored in the Rippling Arno

The colors in this photo are a little off, so when or if I get a better shot (Photoshopping didn't seem to help) I will replace it.  This is a 24 color reduction woodcut, a process invented by Pablo Picasso.  The wood is a 24" length of  of 18" wide clear pine which came from a plank purchased many years ago when I was a sophomore at college.  The professor of my relief print class, J. Terry Downs, and 2 other students and I chipped in to buy the 8' board and split it between us.  It was relatively expensive even then because as Terry Downs pointed out such lumber was no longer available.  I have carried it around for all these years a bit afraid to use it.  But this summer I figured it should get used and had an image in mind, so here tis. I was emboldened by the thought that I can use the other side for another image later, and maybe even plane it down and reuse the surface several times.  Might as well, since in making a reduction print you destroy the image as you go.  

I aimed to create a balance between three things: the material (wood and ink), the facture (marks of the tool kept visible), and the image.  The close up below reveals some of this better than the full view.  Of course, it is much more visible in person.

For me the balance works, probably because I think of all three things when working on a print or painting.  Some viewers will notice the wood grain carrying through all the layers of ink and the slightly motley texture of the ink (which nonetheless manages to stay flat and matt through all those colors).  Others will note how the image is constructed of marks of the tool which look like gouge cuts rather than trying to follow a more precise rendering of contours and textures, rather like the brushstrokes of a Chinese ink painting.  I often think about Xie He's 6 Principles which recommend first and foremost to render not the outward appearance but the spirit of the thing, and secondly how the brushstroke is the 'bone' of an image.  But others will see most clearly the represented image.  Whatever you find interesting (or not), isn't it amazing that something that doesn't resemble the thing portrayed (the colors are all quite off, the cuts and shapes abstracted and quite different from the 'real' image, whatever that means, the texture, light, all far different from even a photo of the place) nonetheless is readily understood as a representation of a place.  See how the water of the Arno breaks up the image in two ways - the relatively clear striated image where the ripples are large and smooth, created by the downhill movement of the water over the subtle terrain beneath the river, and the choppy blurred image nearly dissolved where wind makes the surface flutter.  Both are just horizontal cuts of the gouge rolled up with many layers of colors, yet something of the reflected buildings are visible like the dream of a memory.  

On Living in a Library

When I finished expanding the shelves on one wall of my study a short while ago, the shelf space more than tripled and books immediately began colonizing the new spaces.  They came from all over the house where they had sat in piles on top of shelves, tables, and wherever.  For the time being there is a little bit of room for more.  Notebooks, sketchbooks, and some art materials and unfinished projects have handy-to-reach places that are now somewhat neat.  Perhaps I will be more productive.

There are more bookcases on the other side of the room not seen here, in all the other rooms, and in the wide front hall, so the little c. 1900 house is well on its way to being the proverbial book-lined cottage, though not nearly so much as the charming one inhabited by the character C.S. Lewis as played by Anthony Hopkins years ago in the film Shadowlands.  I recall being a bit envious of that setting.  

On the turning bookcase side table is a guide to Edinburgh, and a children's book titled Scotland's Story vies for attention with the tv remote and a sketchbook on the ottoman.  I'll be off to 'Auld Reekie' in a short while and will no doubt post some thoughts on the experience upon return.  Meanwhile I travel through a universe of places and ideas in the library.  The books are in disarray, but whole shelves could be filled if I organized them with collections that would reveal obsessions: time, space, perspective, science (esp. physics) and math, history, music history & theory, luthiery, chess, foreign languages, cryptography, ancient scripts, philosophy, Leonardo, and of course art from all times and places.  There is fiction also, but mostly in other rooms.  Historical fiction and science fiction probably outnumber other categories in that.  But from the age of two I have preferred to read non-fiction.  

My favorite poet for 40 years has been Yeats; favorite non-fiction writer for 18 years Martin Kemp, favorite fiction author changes much more rapidly.  For some time Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series held my fascination, then the books of Neil Stephenson, especially Cryptonomicon and the immense three volume Baroque Cycle.  That latter has as one of the main characters Sir Isaac Newton.  Leibniz and King Louis the XIV make their appearances.  It leaves you wondering for over 4500 pages why it is categorized as science fiction, why not historical fiction, but then . . . . I won't give it away.  Iain Pear's Dream of Scipio left me pondering for quite some time, and so for a while I read others of his books, all quite good reads.  Enjoyed Robert Harris's Pompeii so much years ago that I tracked down copies of his Cicero books Imperium and Conspirata this summer.  I once wrote a book review of his Pompeii, comparing it with Bulwer-Litton's Last Days of Pompeii.  They are very similar stories with often parallel characters: a hero from out of town, a maiden in distress, an evil priest of Isis. . . , but the comparison reveals the difference of world-views between the 19th century and the late 20th.  One can compare the treatment of his Cicero with that of McCullough's saga.  In her books he is a background character who seems to have sided with the bad guys, while Julius Caesar comes across as heroic and sympathetic.  I got to suspecting as I read the 7-book series that the author was in love with Julius Caesar.  But in Harris's books, Caesar seems the bad guy and Cicero is a very complex and reasonably good character who does the best he can in difficult circumstances.  The more you know of someone, the more you spend time in his house and his mind, the less I think you are likely to judge and dismiss him.  

So many books, so little time.  Now I must get back to work.