I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at the work of other linoleum artists. The fact is that since I seek out and view so much art on Facebook, my feed these days is almost exclusively art of various types, from Golden Age comic art to Disney animation, character sketching, political cartoons, Renaissance work, cave paintings, you name it. And I like it fine!
What has really grabbed my attention of course is the work of other linoleum artists, which I find utterly humbling. I’m very happy with the work I do, but in essence my pieces are a single image printed in black ink on white paper, and if you’ve read my posts on my “Christmas Carol” experiments, you know I struggle with anything more complex.
I’m sure there are other destination FB pages but I spend a lot of time at Linocut Friends, begun in Lisbon in 2011, comprising a thoroughly international group of talented individuals. The group has over 40,000 members.
Looking over the work of these folks, it quickly becomes clear that the techniques and methods from person to person could not be more individual or varied. There are beginners struggling with their first printing efforts, pros turning out multicolored, large format framable works of art, lots of purely experimental work, and every imaginable stage in between. When I spend time there I am either picking up valuable tips and tricks, or offering advice from my own experiences. Sometimes I ask questions, sometimes I answer them.
Lino printing has a long history as an art medium. Linoleum was invented as a floor covering in the 1850s and was patented by Frederick Edward Walton in 1863. Hobbyists discovered it as a carveable block-printing medium in the latter half of the 19th century, and it became “respectable” sometime in the early 1900’s when such artists as Picasso and Matisse began using it.
I learned lino cutting and printing in high school in the 1960s and the various tools and methods have not changed at all in that time. In fact we learned back then that a good alternative to a baren or small press for pressing the ink onto the paper was to use the back of a wooden spoon, and the very same advice still comes up in lino discussions to this day.
It’s also interesting to see how my personal methods stack up against those of others. I often “proof” my cutting progress with a series of rubbings with scrap paper and a stick of graphite, much like folks used to do rubbings of old headstones. I’ve puzzled over whether I invented this little trick, since I rarely see it used elsewhere, or if I learned it somewhere. As yet I’ve only seen one other person in the FB group use it. It sure seems useful but apparently it’s not widely used.
I’m not sure I will be doing another Dickens book, but I think linoleum cutting is now my medium. The simplest definition of my job as an artist is that I make marks on paper. It’s the artist’s task to decide just how to make those marks. I’ve worked in pencil, pen-and-ink, colored pencils, airbrush, easel painting, digital, 3D, and now linoleum. While lino-printing is a process with many technical steps, the simple act of gouging lines out of soft linoleum is actually pretty pleasant and satisfying.
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