The hare's been sold out six weeks and I'm still carving her
Lads, I have a confession. The hare print sold out before Christmas, all forty of them gone, and I'm still in the workshop every night gouging away at the same block like a lunatic.
Told myself I was doing a second run. I even bought the paper, a big sheet of Fabriano I sliced down at the kitchen table on Sunday while the young fella ate his Weetabix and judged me silently. But that's a lie. I'm not running an edition. I'm just carving her over and over because I haven't figured out the next thing yet and I can't stand the quiet of a blank block sitting there.
You know the way it goes. Every printmaker has the one image that pays the rent and pays the soul and they don't always line up. And when you're between ideas you reach for the thing your hands already know, and you tell yourself it's practice, and it is, sort of, but it's also hiding.
My wife asked me the other night how long I was going to keep at the hare and I said grand, not long, and she gave me the look. She knows the look she's getting back. Sitting there with a fresh cup of tea going cold beside me, six hours in, and I'd swear I've made the ears slightly better each time. Which is the problem. They're fine. They were fine the first time.
Anyway. I'll stop.
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Carving her again is not procrastination, it is the way you find the next thing. The hands keep working while the head catches up. I have done this with rooms, though a room is harder to hide than a block. Nobody walks into the studio and asks why the wall is still up.
The part about not standing the quiet of a blank block, that is the real thing you said. Most people I know fill that quiet with a new project too fast and it shows in the work. You are filling it by refusing to let go, which is slower but probably kinder to whatever comes next.
Ji, this is a very true thing you have said, about the hands working while the head is catching up. In our Mithila work also it is like this. When my mother passed, for many months I kept filling the same background with the same fine lines, the fish, the lotus, not for any order. Only to keep the hand moving while the mind was settling. My wife used to ask, for whom you are making this. No answer I had.
And what you say about the quiet, that is the real point. In our tradition we say the empty space on the paper is not empty, it is waiting. The young ones today, they fill it with anything quickly, and it is showing. Better to sit with it some time. The block and the wall, both are honest company.
Ji, that stopped me a minute. The fish and the lotus, months of it, no order, no answer when your wife asks who it's for. That's the whole thing, isn't it. I don't have a great answer for it either except that the hand knows something the head hasn't caught up to yet.
My own version was smaller. When I was about two years off the drink I carved the same heron maybe eleven times, not an edition, just the one bird over and over, and my missus asked me one night was I ever going to make anything else. I hadn't a word for her. It was only later I copped it was doing the settling for me. The head was busy elsewhere and the gouge kept me company.
And "the empty space is not empty, it is waiting" is a far better line than anything I'll carve this year. I'm having that. I'll credit you to anyone who asks and probably to a few who don't.
Ah that's a lovely way of putting it, the hands working while the head catches up. I'll be robbing that one off you if you don't mind.
Rooms though. You're right and it's not even close. A block you can shove in a drawer when the mother-in-law calls in. You can't shove a wall in a drawer. The wall has to sit there being a wall at you, and every visitor gets to have an opinion on it.
And yeah, the quiet of the blank block. The temptation is to start something loud straight away just to have noise in the place, and you can hear it in the print after. Suppose the hare's just my way of not starting something I don't mean yet. Slower, like you said. Cheers for that.