1/23/2024 0 Comments Joseph vorgity moku hanga![]() For example, I was horrified during the first GW Bush campaign when I noticed that the candidate often used language from Christian hymns and prayers and that the media completely missed it. I’m not sure yet how long my break will be but here are some of the notes I made on Saturday and Sunday.įor a long time I’ve been aware of the political "dog whistles" (coded words that appear to mean one thing but have an additional meaning for a targeted subgroup) that are used by conservatives. For two days, whenever I felt the urge to log on to Facebook or Twitter, I wrote about it in a little notebook I carried around. ![]() This past weekend, after spending a tumultuous week following Facebook and Twitter posts about the San Bernardino shooting and feeling that I needed to settle my nerves, I decided to take a break from social media. I use a portable easel with a couple of different bench hooks to keep the block upright and close to my eyes. It's this human striving for something perfect, beautiful and pure in the midst of the imperfection and hardship of life that I could feel being recapitulated in a small way for me in this process. Why not just do a high-end inkjet print? Or why not use a photographic process like silkscreen or photo etching? What is this drive to do it by hand with a knife on a piece of wood?Īs I pondered this, I realized that this arduous process - this attempt to make 6,000 perfect circles with my imperfect tools and my shaky hand and my farsighted middle-aged eyes -is precisely what religion at its best calls forth in a human being. The image is perfect when printed out on a digital printer. I'll probably give that a try at some point too, but as I was carving today with my knife I began to think about this whole imperfect process of re-creating a computer generated image by hand. Another printmaker friend told me about a drill bit that's cone-shaped so you can vary the width of the circles by how deeply you drive the bit. One of these is on the way to me now, so I'll report back after I've tried it. Turns out there's a Japanese tool called a tama-to, available at McClain's, that's designed for cutting circles. When I posted about this on Facebook I got some great tips. Two different sized hangi-to and an X-Acto knife, with tiny circular wood chips. So I've been carving with knives: my two hangi-to and a #2 X-Axto blade. Realized that there were infinite small variations in the sizes of theseĭots, from less than 1/32 inch to around 3/8. I have a sweet little handĭrill with 8 different bit sizes that my dad passed down to me, but after a few tests I I thought a drill would be ideal for this. ![]() Nevertheless, I got a great transfer and have been plodding along with the carving for about two months.Ī close view of some circles of varying sizes. ![]() ![]() I did it outdoors so I wouldn't keel over from the fumes, but I wouldn't recommend xylene as a go-to transfer agent because of the toxicity. I tried oil of wintergreen and also citrisolve, but I wasn't happy with either so I ended up using Chartpak blender markers which contain a toxic chemical called xylene. This required the image transfer onto the block to be very precise, so rather than pasting down a laser printout as I often do I wanted to do a true toner transfer. I wanted to work with the optical illusion that a dot pattern invites, where you only see the dots when you're up close, but the image reveals itself at a certain distance, so I chose the coarsest dot pattern I could use and still make out the image. The photo above shows a 13 x 13 inch block of wood with a computer-generated image of a Buddha statue transferred onto it and carving underway. In October I started carving circles for the first of these images, a Buddha. Sometime this fall I got captured by the idea of creating a semi-photographic woodblock image as a halftone (continuous tone image made of dots), and since I've been wanting to work with religious images lately I decided to try making halftones of photographs of icons and statues from various religious traditions. Carving underway on halftone Buddha image. ![]()
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