Cutting a Linocut in Six Nights

The printmaking studio sits on the top floor of the annex, where the radiators give up somewhere around eight in the evening. Nobody complains. The smell of solvent and cheap paper holds the room together better than the heating does. I got there at seven with a bruised knee and a fresh block of linoleum under my arm, and stayed until the janitor started switching off the corridor lights.

The image is the underpass near the tobacco warehouses, the one with the tiled wall that somebody has been painting over for twenty years. I sketched it in October, standing on my board so my feet wouldn't go numb. In the drawing it was a place. On the plate it has to become a set of decisions: what stays, what gets gouged away, what ends up printing as nothing at all.

The Knife Does Not Negotiate

A drawing forgives you. You can smudge it, add a line, claim the last line was a mistake you meant. Linoleum keeps a record. Every cut is final, and the block only tells the truth once it has been through the press. My first two attempts are in the drawer, ruined by the same impatience — I went too deep near the top edge and the sky turned into a hole.

Everything you don't want to print has to be cut away. That is the whole craft, and it took me a while to believe it.

My hands are a mess in a very specific way. Ink sits under the nails for days, black first and then a dull green, and the grip tape on my board leaves its own marks across the palm. In the studio people ask why I don't wear gloves. I have tried. You cannot feel the depth of a cut through rubber, and the depth is the only thing that matters.

Two in the Morning, Roller in Hand

I print at night because the press is free and nobody is waiting. The routine is boring in a good way: ink on glass, roll until the sound turns tacky, paper soaked and blotted, three passes, lift a corner first and then the whole sheet. When it works, the black is deeper than anything I can draw. When it doesn't, you get a grey smear, a clean sheet and less confidence.

The knee swelled on the walk from the plaza back to the studio — a bad landing on a flat ground trick, of all things, in front of two kids who found it hilarious. I limped up four flights. It didn't matter. The plate was waiting, and the plate does not care about your knee.

I hung the print up to dry at three in the morning and stood looking at it longer than I should have. It isn't good yet. The underpass reads too flat and the shadows need one more layer. But it exists, and the next one will be better, and tomorrow the knee will be a little less angry. That is roughly how the week goes.