Triangle tiled scroll woodcuts

I made three large woodcut ‘scrolls’ in September of 1999. Two of them were installed in the Zen Garden Room I designed and built for the UMB Technology Center in Kansas city. Two of the prints were similar (I kept one for myself), and the third was twice as wide.

I had already cut a bunch of mahogany plywood triangles to adorn the big ‘moon window’ in the room and had a bunch of  triangles left over. I attached them to 3″ squares of similar plywood to make movable tiles for block printing. I made a frame which held 108 of the tiles in two parallel grids each of which was 18 tiles long by 3 tiles wide. I arranged the tiles in the grids, inked them quickly with sumi, and printed them on a thin Japanese paper (Okawara Scroll). Then I rearranged the tiles, re-inked them, and reprinted the same papers. I repeated this process a number of times until I was satisfied with the depth and range of tones, and the results are pictured below.

The printing frame was so beautiful in the end! I permanently attached the tiles with short brads, framed the thing, and placed it in the room opposite the prints, which I had pasted onto linen and hung like Japanese scrolls.