I am interested in the paper you use. What is it? Do you use the large rolls? How do you manage them? How about a blog entry on paper, management from A to Z.

April and Richard are lovely people and excellent teachers, aren’t they? You’re lucky to have worked with them!

OK — ball bearing barens…

First, I must say that NOTHING compares to my medium hon-baren — it feels like a natural extension of me and for most work, that’s what I use — ball bearing barens are excellent for heavier papers (like BFK), large areas of color, etc. Not great for prints with very fine, widely spaced lines (for that you need a ‘fine’ or ’soft’ baren — something flatter). Ball bearing barens fall into the ’strong’ or ‘hard’ category and offer great mechanical advantage (stronger printing with less effort). They also require very little maintenance compared to traditional barens (which have a bamboo bark/skin cover which wears out and must be replaced on a regular basis — that requires both takenokawa (bamboo skin) AND skill acquired through much practice.

The Korokoro Baren available at http://www.barenforum.org/mall/products/barens.php is a wonderful tool. It falls into the ’strong’ class of barens (though my Rei Yuki ball bearing baren is WAY stronger — too strong for most of my work, actually). The leather strap handle barens on the same page are all a bit ’softer’ or ‘finer’ than the korokoro. A good combination would be to have both — one either type ‘C’ or ‘D’ and the other the Korokoro — that will allow you to print all but fine-line blocks (for which you’ll still need a fine baren — something relatively smooth which has a softer touch) — ball bearing barens tend to break very fine lines and it’s difficult to reproduce the finest lines because they sorta ‘bump’ the paper against the edges, so the printed line gets fatter than you intend. You really do need two or even three barens — one for ‘fine’ printing, one for ‘general printing’ and for printing ‘large’ areas of unbroken color. The Korokoro baren (or any of the other ball bearing barens illustrated) can do the last two well enough — but you’ll need a ‘fine’ baren for fine work.

Thanks for your fascinating website and your creative work.

I’m just getting started (workshops with Richard Steiner, April Vollmer) and have been using a disk baren. Would you compare the Korokoro baren with the other ball-bearing barens with leather handles… do you think the Korokoro baren will last a long time, do you think it is uncomfortable to use for a long edition or large prints? The price is about half that of the leather handle barens so am wondering what one must compromise with… if anything. Appreciate your comments.

Neato!

My web-site doesn’t currently show any of my older work, I only put it up in this form a few days ago… During the next several weeks, I’ll be converting and adding older content and then, I think, my conversion from hand-carving to machine carving (and machine drawing, painting, drypoint, mezzotint, lithography, etc) may be easier to figure out.

In March of 2004, when I decided to purchase a computer controlled router, I was producing woodcuts for a solo exhibition in Kyoto, Japan (at Gallery Ezoshi). The show was scheduled for October of that year and I had a LOT of prints still to produce. That year I pulled about 60,000 impressions, all by hand using a traditional baren. Until March, I was also carving by hand and it was really a bit too much for my body! An old rotator cuff injury was complaining loudly, I hurt all over, and I was suffering an acute dermatitis which, at the time, I thought was caused by oils in the woods I was carving (but turned out to be more likely an effect of the formalin I used to extend the open time of the damp papers I printed). Anyway, I was falling behind and I had a great desire to produce LARGER work! I’d long fantasized about building something like a computer controlled Etch-A-Sketch for painting experiments and the ShopBot CNC machine was relatively inexpensive at the time (less than $7,000), so…

I was using PhotoShop to design my hand-carved blocks at the time ANYway — and seemed to me quite clear that the paper could NOT tell WHAT removed the parts which don’t print — so it was an EASY step to program the machine to rout blocks in exactly the same patterns as I had been hand-carving. I could print while the machine carved the next block and that sped up my process a LOT without changing the prints themselves at ALL (except that I became free to design larger and larger and more and more complex blocks and prints). And the way it all worked stimulated me to think in new ways!

In truth, I can carve MUCH more precisely than the machine (which is unable to reliably carve extremely fine lines) — but the machine is much faster than I am, tireless, and easier to repair! I don’t think I would EVER have undertaken the carving of the 17 blocks for “Sara” without machine assistance — that would have been too large a task for me and too great a commitment to a single image. I have ALWAYS felt that the ‘ART’ of woodcuts was in the printing, not the carving, so… To answer your question… No, I don’t much long for the carving — that was always a means to an end for me — I still do hand-carve (though only occasionally) and I get plenty of ‘craft’ satisfaction from making jigs and other stuff — I’m mostly interested these days in drawing and painting (using the equipment and my computer) and don’t feel that’s going to let up for a long time — every piece seems to point the way toward a dozen others and I STILL can only execute a fraction of what comes to mind.

Thanks for writing, and best to you,

Mike

Thx and awesome work,
-Mark Herschede