the cassandra pages

Multiple-Color Printing

There are several methods for making multiple-color relief prints, and in every case, the tricky part is the registration of the colors. In a reduction print, the same block is used throughout. You print a number of copies of the first color, then carve away a bit more, print another color, and so forth. By the end, of course, the block cannot be used to print another edition because most of it has been carved away. But the registration issues only involve placing the paper in exactly the same place every time.

When printing from multiple blocks, both the paper and the different blocks have to be in register for every copy. But nothing is destroyed in the process; you can print editions with different colorways, start over, add additional colors by making another block. I've made a few two-color prints, but this was the first time I tried three. Above are proof prints of each of the colors that will be combined onto one sheet of paper in the final print. Below, the blocks used to create them.

One block, called the key block, contains the most helpful information for keeping everything in one place - in this case, that's the black one, with the most complex detail. The other blocks are based on it and have to be created in perfect register. This is not particularly easy, because of the amount of handwork involved in tracing a mirror image onto a substrate that's going to be carved by hand.The blocks have to be exactly the same size, and held by some sort of system - I used a jig that I made out of matboard, mounted securely on a slightly sticky mat of a vinyl material used to line shelves. There also has to be a method for placing the paper in the same place for each color impression: I used finely-ruled lines on the edges of the matboard; for a larger print I would use a pin-registration system similar to that used by offset printers in the days before digital pre-press.

Below, the blue block and red block have been printed. The black lines of the key block will cover the gaps that you can see in the image, for example around the upper hand, and the triangular motif of the gown below the neck. (For the final edition, I mixed a slate-blue color rather than the brighter blue shown here.)

I'm just learning about the technical problems involved, but I have to admit, it's the kind of challenge I like - and it fits pretty well with my early days as a graphic designer, when we cut masks out of rubylith and had to figure out the registration of multiple-color jobs ourselves, setting them up manually. And it's OK with me not to have an absolutely perfect result - part of the unique beauty of a hand-pulled print is that it is just that: handmade. We're so used to computers making everything perfect. This is an ancient process, and I like it for exactly that reason.

 

From the Studio this Week

Olive. I'm experimenting with multiple-color relief prints...more on that in a day or two...and papers other than my usual Japanese rice papers. This is on lightweight Rives BFK, printed by hand: paper which is just substantial enough to be used as a card.

 

And it's been back to drawing. You've probably seen many of these objects here before! I like the relative speed and looseness of this fountain pen sketch.

 

And an ink and watercolor wash drawing of some broccoli rabe on a blue ceramic dish, done last night while dinner was in the oven. It feels good to be drawing again after a long break over the holidays.

 

 

 

In-between

 

 

 

On Sunday afternoons, I leave the cathedral around12:30, have something simple to eat -- a sandwich, a bowl of soup - and then walk through the underground city or along the streets for two hours, before rehearsal for Evensong begins. The walking is exercise for my shoulders and legs, to shake off the stiffness from holding a music folder while standing in concentration, but also for my eyes and head: long views instead of arm's-length, bright light, the busyness and movement and indifference of the city forming both a respite from, and a heightened awareness of our practice: a detailed focus on six or seven centuries of liturgical music, performed to the best of our ability. The city swirls around me, rushed, fragmentary, neon, bought, sold -- and I am in it, part of it, and also there, in that other place, where out of the gathered silence emerges the first note, an enormity.

Winter Walk

After the past few days of arctic winds, today feels almost warm. I walk to meet a friend for tea, a half-hour walk, bundled in scarf, hat, down parka with its coyote-trimmed hood, gloves, warm boots. Parents pull little children on sleds; a few cyclists ride through six inches of snowy slush on studded tires; on the distant edge of the park, the upper bodies of hockey players glide back and forth behind the boards of the rink, frictionless and silent. In Oslo, Helsinki, Moscow, other people are doing the same things, we're used to it, sixty years of it in my case, the way we stamp our feet when we enter an interior, feel the heat against our cold cheeks, undo the zippers and push back the hoods, strip off a few layers of wool and fleece, present our faces for two kisses from those who're already inside.

Pennsylvania

January 17, rural Pennsylvania. This is a Quaker house of many books, in every room, collected over a lifetime. The shelf closest to my bed where I wake is devoted to religion and spirituality: I glance over the titles and see biographies of William Tyndale, Francis of Assisi and Gandhi, but the focus of the collection is Quaker thought and Quaker history. It's Sunday, and my brother-in-law and sister-in-law are already at Meeting. A soft morning light filters through the bare branches of tamaracks, and a dozen mourning doves peck and coo beneath the bird feeder in a gnarled old quince.

I read a little of William Penn's writings, and then look him up and realize I know next to nothing about this man I think of as a founding father and colleague of Benjamin Franklin's, but who was actually born 60 years earlier. As a young man at the time of Cromwell, Penn was imprisoned in the Tower of London for his Quaker beliefs, disinherited by his aristocratic Anglican father, but eventually released and reconciled. He received his inheritance and a grant from the King, and founded the province of Pennsylvania as a haven for England's persecuted Quakers, advocating peace, pacifism, the equality of men and women. His writings and thought were greatly admired by Voltaire, and later by that other Pennsylvanian, Franklin, but Penn - too generous, and a poor manager - finally died penniless in England.

The calendar tells me it's Franklin's birthday today: unlike the Wikipedia (also celebrating, but only 15) Franklin would be 306 today; Penn, 372. Those centuries compress as we drive through the countryside of Bucks County, past one colonial homestead after another, built of solid fieldstones, set into a landscape of streams and rolling fields that Penn must have loved, and Franklin and Washington no doubt saw with their own eyes. A revolution, and pacifism: how did those ideas coexist then? Penn wrote: "My prison shall be my grave before I will budge a jot: for I owe my conscience to no mortal man."

 

Reconstruction

Two hours in the dental chair, two syringes of Novocaine, one new crown. We talk about David Bowie, Donald Trump, Bernie; Florida, Mexico, Montreal; mattresses, computers, violin sonatas, discothèques. The chairside conversation moves seamlessly from English (with me) to French (with the dental assistant, who is Indian) with smatterings of German, Italian, Spanish. Trump isn't electable, I offer, through a mouth packed with cotton. "Oh yes he is, my dear," says the dentist. "'Give me your freedom, and in exchange I'll give you back everything you think you've lost.'" He is Romanian, and knows dictators, and I haven't the ability to argue, with all these fingers and metallic objects in my mouth.

When we're finally finished he says Auf Wiedersehen, and raises the chair. I answer Danke schön, and rise slowly, massaging my neck, and when I glance over at him, he's doing the same thing, grimacing. "Where did our twenty-year-old bodies go?" I ask, and laugh. He smiles: "We're aging gracefully," and puts his arm around my shoulder. "And with humor," I add. "Black as it is!"

Outside on St Catherine street at 2:00 pm, snow is falling steadily. I gulp lungfuls of the cold, damp air before entering the underground, buy a carrot muffin that I stash in my purse, and then stop in a public bathroom where I'm shocked to see my paralyzed face in the mirror, one side of my mouth frozen and drooping; I look like I've had a stroke. I pull my scarf around my jaw and take the metro to Papineau, where I wait in the snow to catch a grimy double bus north, feeling battered and hungry, and wondering when the anesthetic will have worn off enough that I can eat something without biting a hole in my face.

But when the bus starts up the hill, we pass a cherry tree, still loaded with bright red fruits, each cluster sporting a topknot of snow, and when I turn around to watch this marvel recede in the window I notice that the young woman behind me is studying a difficult classical piano score. I can't see the composer's name, just that it is a prelude, probably Bach, and I take a deep breath as I press the buzzer for my stop and allow the world to rearrange before stepping out into the clean snow.

Scenes from a Park, Before Snow

I looked up when the branches swung.

White gulls were eating black cherries.

-Tomas Transtromer

It is the sky's being so grey

that makes the ground begin to shine.

-Tomas Transtromer

Maybe this is the only way to avoid fear

Settle into fear like one inhabiting slowness

Ghosts we all possess

Simply waiting for someone or something in the ruins.

-Roberto Bolano

 

Lavoir

 

The Last of the Holly, and a New Writer

My New Year's Eve visitor this year was a hard cold, so I've been welcoming January 2016 from the couch. I haven't been sick for quite a while, so the enforced slowdown has been an adjustment and - now that I'm feeling somewhat better - a not unwelcome one. I've been drawing and painting a little bit, and last night I read through a couple of Bach preludes and fugues, but mostly I'm drinking hot tea with some local miel urbain, a Christmas gift that was gathered from hives on the roofs of UQAM, and reading Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives: set in Mexico City, and utterly brilliant.

I don't know how it's taken me this long to get to Bolaño... but there it is. J. read this novel first and loved it very much (this from someone who rarely reads novels at all) and I impatiently waited for him to hand over the library copy. Meanwhile I've been reading a bit of Bolaño's poetry, which I like enough to want the large collection, The Unknown University. This unpublished poem was found in one of his notebooks containing some of the poems for the book, published posthumously:

My Literary Career

Rejections from Anagrama, Grijalbo, Planeta, certainly also from Alfaguara,

Mondadori. A no from Muchnik, Seix Barral, Destino...All the publishers...All the readers

All the sales managers...

Under the bridge, while it rains, a golden opportunity

to take a look at myself:

like a snake in the North Pole, but writing

Writing poetry in the land of idiots.

Writing with my son on my knee.

Writing until night falls

with the thunder of a thousand demons.

The demons who will carry me to hell,

but writing.

(October 1990)