Printing with Metal Powders - notes ...
Before coming to Japan many years ago, I had been worried that I would find that the old woodblock print craftsmen would be quite secretive about their work. I expected that it would be difficult for me to learn many of the techniques of woodblock printmaking, because I was an 'outsider'.
As it turned out, my fears were generally groundless. They readily answered my questions, and seemed quite willing to show me anything. As the years went by and I developed better ability with the language, making communication easier, I started to ask more complicated questions and ran into a bit of a different situation. It wasn't that they stopped telling me things, it was that the things I was asking weren't easily explained in 'so many words'. Learning many of the older techniques became not so much a matter of 'asking and listening', but of watching and doing ...
But it would not be the whole truth to leave it at that. In recent years, perhaps as a result of my own increased skills, I have run into a few cases where the person I was talking to obviously did not want to cooperate with my request. Some of the older men are quite proud of their skills, some of which were learned from masters a great many years ago. There are very few people now left with such skills, and these men in consequence feel a bit as though they are custodians of a sort of 'treasure'. Some of these men, not all by any means, do not easily share these treasures ...
I specifically had trouble learning the techniques of printing with metals. Nobody would say 'no' right to my face, but each time I brought up the topic, the conversation would slide away in a different direction, and we would somehow find ourselves talking about yesterday's sumo match ...
I persevered though, and through a mix of my own experiments, watching others carefully whenever I got the chance, and some help from one of the older printers who grudgingly 'gave in' one afternoon and let me into his workroom for a very short demonstration, have arrived at the stage where I can now reproduce what I see in the old surimono prints.
If you have just finished reading the previous page, in which I outlined a basic metal printing technique, you may be asking yourself, "Well, so what? That was pretty simple. This is a 'secret' lost art that took David decades to uncover?"
Well ... I'm not sure how to answer your question. Reading through the description on that previous page, yes, I have to admit that it does seem pretty simple. But reading and doing are two very different animals; printing one little test sample is perhaps not too difficult - printing a run of 200+ consistent copies is something of a different story.
In this Encyclopedia I have freely given of whatever I have learned over the years, but as I get a bit older, I am more and more coming to understand something of the viewpoint of the older men here. Would you like to know 'how I do it'? Sure, here you go. But knowledge given that way is actually nearly worthless. Doing 200 copies of the bronze powder on that Hokkei reproduction called on nearly everything I have learned about printing over the last 20 years - the ability to sense tiny differences in the moisture of the paper and how to adjust the baren pressure as a result ... the ability to deal with the brush when the gelatine started to thicken as I went along ... just what to do when a certain 'patchy' appearance started to develop in one area of the impression ... Dozens of times during the course of that long day, I was faced with a problem that one thing and only one thing could solve - my long years of experience.
I also have to admit to a little bit of 'playing around' with that little photo essay. You may have noticed that although the woodblock itself is shown clearly in each photo, you can't see my workbench, or the tools and supplies ...
What's that, you want to know a bit more about the gelatine mixture? Whaddya think ... will those Yankees be able to repeat this year?