Printshop holiday 2

On the second day of our workshop, each of us cut our own linoleum block to illustrate the poem we had typeset.  Here's one version:

I thought it was unfortunate that the poem chosen for the exercise was about a horse.  Not that I have anything against horses, but I don't know how to draw them, don't particularly want to learn, and had no interest in putzing around making some lame horse picture that would look like third-grade drawing.  So I decided (alone among my co-participants) to do an abstract design.

I focused on the last line of the poem -- I want out -- and went back to my all-time default imagery of a spiral and an eye.  Those two motifs became indispensable during my three years of daily collage and one year of daily hand stitching, and I thought they combined to say "I want out."

Here's what I came up with for the linocut:

I love everything about it except one minuscule overcut -- the ray in the iris pointing toward 5 o'clock, which went a hair too far.  I could have gone back and carved a bit more out to its right, but realized the problem too late.  But on the whole, I thought that for a lifetime first try at block cutting, it wasn't too bad.

Here's Gray Zeitz getting my block set up on the press.  His meticulous fussing with the type's positioning and height made the printed sheets look wonderful.  It turned out that our linoleum blanks were a shade less than type-high (the standard height of all type and presses in the U.S.) so he had to raise the block a bit by putting some pieces of paper underneath.

Here's what the finished broadsides looked like:

We ended up with an edition of 15 prints: three different typefaces, and five different blocks.  And five extremely happy participants, who had the chance to play in the printshop for two days.  What could be more fun?