Woodcuts and Linoleum

A black and white woodcut print has a particular quality. Not only is it only black and white only (IF it is printed on white paper!) but it has no shading: no grey areas. It is not like a drawing, say, a charcoal drawing, or a pencil drawing, with shading. A woodcut print has more or less broad areas of black, usually, juxtaposed with broad areas of white. With a certain sensitivity.

Or course one can render any subject matter that one pleases in woodcuts, but whatever it is, it will have that characteristic of being only in dark black, and white. (Or red, and white, or navy and white, or turquoise and white, you get the idea.)

An orange, for instance - the fruit - might possibly only work in a woodcut as a solid shape of an orange, or as the shape cut out from the middle with only a black outline. (More difficult to do.) A cut-out white crescent moon would work, for instance, but only if there is black left all around it.

Linoleum cuts are also made, using woodcut tools, and printed out exactly the same way. What is fun is to study different artists' renditions - or different illustrators or commercial artists - done in this graphic medium of black and white.

Speaking of black and white illustrations, let's talk about black and white in general, and of course we are talking about 2-dimensional black and white. When I was in college it was sometimes referred to as "graphics", or "graphic arts", actually!

One way to address black and white art is to think of etchings, and of woodcuts in particular, for now. Woodcuts are often implemented in a soft pine board, (medium-size, for the sake of handling) with special woodcutting knives, or tools. Sometimes people draw on the board first, to indicate where they want to cut, or remove, material. To remove material (wood) creates the area(s) which will become white, in the print-out. Sometimes people paint first - usually black - onto the pine board, and this will become the indication of where to leave the wood alone, as it represents where the artist wants the black to remain.

Other times, a person will simply start cutting, with one or more tools, and after a while, will take a print, to see how it's coming along: sort of a "from the gut" approach, for black and white.

Illustration

Another form of 2-dimensional art is illustration. Illustration comes in many forms, including books (and children's books in particular), posters, murals (again), decoration, advertising, poetry, and even mapwork.

Comes to mind the memorable illustrations from my childhood, in Mother Goose: so many poems, and most of them had a skillful and charming line-illustration in accompaniment. There were long, puffy skirts, ruffly, broad-brimmed bonnets, excellent animals, some of whom who talked, pretty English-style trees on the horizon, and of course to top it all off, Mother, with her ringlets, riding on the bridled Goose.

Illustrations can also come in novels, to mark the onset of certain chapters, and can be simple but well-designed graphics in a woodcut style print, in black and white only. This spring I've enjoyed reading the novel "Cross Creek," from the '30's if I remember right, by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, (she was the author of "The Yearling"). This book contained a lovely bunch of these black-and-white illustrations, picturing the "swamp" country in Florida, and which additionally kept me enthralled the whole time!