He wanted to be sure we all did things the right He was a very generous personality and loved to share He lived in New York City for many years and taught at NYU. He was a hanga woodblock printmaker from way back, having studied moku-hanga in Japan during the Sixties. Matt cites David Bull, who is a mostly self-taught English-born Canadian living in Japan, and an artist named Bill Paden as people from whom he learned a great deal. He started making woodblock prints in the early 1990s and learned mostly through books, like Walter Phillips' Technique of the Color Woodcut. The rest I learned on my own and with some help from the online Baren Forum, started in the 90s by David Bull. I call Matt my teacher, and will continue to do so, but the truth is it was a three-day workshop and that was the extent of my formal training. I learned mokuhanga from Matt Brown, a New Englander like myself, at a workshop here in Massachusetts.

Perhaps because mokuhanga was transmitted through a system of apprenticeship for most of its history, the role of the teacher/master is very important and students consider themselves to be lifelong students of their particular teacher no matter how adept they become. For example, the form of meditation that I practice, which began in India, proudly traces a multi-generation lineage of teachers. Lineage seems to be an especially strong concept in the east. While reading April Vollmer's new book about mokuhanga, I noticed that when talking about an artist she would often mention that artist's lineage: where and with whom they studied. Although it wasn't my intention as I began these prints, whiteness has become one of the themes in this project. This isn't surprising given the context, but it makes working with the images take a certain direction. The Horizon is a Circle that divideth the Part of the World seen from the Part that cannot be seen.Īs you may notice about these colonial era images I'm working with (it's impossible to not notice, really), almost all of the images feature white males. I will be pairing this image with another quote from The New Book of Knowledge (1767): The fisherman says no, and the moral of the fable is 'Never let go a Certainty for an Uncertainty.' I'm sure this is good advice for someone, but not for an artist. It's a grammar and reading textbook and this picture, which I'm cropping and reproducing at a scale of about 500%, was used to illustrate a fable called 'The Fisherman and the Fish' in which a captured fish asks to be released, promising that she (yep, the fish is female) will come back and allow herself to be caught when she's grown larger.

The image comes from a book by Thomas Dilworth called A New Guide to the English Tongue, published in Philadelphia in 1770. The next print in my Almanack series begins with this carving of a man fishing. So I chose the fabled American Jackalope. And I wanted the image to be strong and graphic and legible from a distance. I wanted the image to be light – maybe to make fun of us, but gently so. This is a new experience for me, to have studio assistants!įor my rugby ball image I wanted to do something American, but not too American (no statue of liberty or apple pie) and I wanted to make a comment about the American character but refrain from getting too political (which I am wont to do). Unfortunately, the deadline is too tight for me to receive the linoleum, cut it, and get it back to Newcastle in time for the event, so Northern Print has offered to do the cutting there based on my sketch. These will be designed by artists from each nation and I've volunteered to design the ball for the USA. Set within the design are 20 rugby ball shapes of lino, one for each of the competing nations. You can see large views of these panels on the Scrum Down, Print Forward Facebook page. The panels for the 33 meter print (108 feet) were designed by UK illustrator Sara Ogilvie and are now being carved by artists from 11 print studios, representing the 11 UK World Cup host cities.

Joseph vorgity moku hanga