The kettle in the studio has a dedicated "warm the lino" setting and my wife thinks that's the saddest thing she's ever heard
Right so, small confession.
Years ago I stopped trying to carve cold lino. You'd be fighting the stuff, the tool skidding, the surface like a frozen jaffa, and you'd blame your hands when really the block was just stone cold. So now the kettle goes on the minute I get in. Not for tea, not at first anyway. I sit the block on an old tea towel beside it, let it take the warmth for ten minutes while I have the actual tea and stare at the drawing and convince myself I know what I'm doing.
Means the studio smells faintly of burnt dust and hot rubber now. Which is a smell I've come to love and absolutely nobody else would.
The wife came in last week to call me for dinner, saw the block propped up on the towel like a patient in a hospital bed, and just looked at me. "It's not even a real setting, Niall." It is though. It's the setting between boil and off. That's a setting.
Anyway I'm midway through a big heron piece, 40cm by 60cm, three blocks for it, and the grey block is the one giving me trouble. Grey always takes the warmth worse than the brown. I'm aware how mental that sentence would sound to anyone outside this room.
What's the mad ritual you'd have to explain with a straight face? I'll read them all tonight before I go back to the heron.
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The ten minutes staring at the drawing while the block warms up is the real trick here, I think. You give yourself permission to do nothing and it's secretly when the decisions get made. I do something similar with pastel, I'll lay the paper out and walk away and come back and suddenly see the whole face wrong in a way I couldn't while I was sitting in front of it.
The burnt rubber smell though, I'm not sure I could love that one. My studio just smells of fixative and regret.
"fixative and regret" is a hell of a studio smell, I'd buy that candle 🙂
And you've it exactly, that's the bit nobody tells you. The ten minutes isn't me being idle, it's the only part of the whole job where I'm not allowed to touch anything, so the head actually gets to have its say. Half my carvings get saved in those ten minutes. The other half get ruined the second the block's warm and I start cutting like a fella who knows what he's at.
Walking away and coming back is the honest version of it though. The face that looked grand up close and wrong from the door. I do it with a proof pinned up, leave it, come back after the dinner and the wrong bit is roaring at me from across the room.
I'll keep my burnt rubber. You keep your regret. Between us we've a fine studio going.