I think I know how the whole thing started...

I recognized Daryl's name when he posted something in Baren and eventually we got together and caught up on the lost years. The Baren discussion at the time was a silly exchange about printing with vehicles. That is, placing the woodblock on a flat surface, paper on top, some sort of protective tympan on top of that, and cranking up the Buick to carefully run over the whole print. It was quite a discussion, check it out in the Baren Archives.
I mentioned that I had seen a 4'x8' woodcut print while in Seattle; it was gorgeous.

So when I got to visit Daryl at his graduate studio, one of the first things he said was: "let's do a car-print!"
Of course I said yes. My husband said: "HUH? A WHAT-PRINT?"

That's my story and I'm sticking to it. The rest is history, recorded below.

Day 2 and perhaps 3 and 4
Discussions
Sometime in early October, 1999
Many things to work out before we got going, many more came up as we got along the trail.
First we were feeling each other out, I think, seeing if we were serious about this thing. We were. First we e-mailed each other a few good plans. I saw his studio, he saw mine, we exchanged a little piece of cherry wood for plastic wood, we showed our knives...then we decided on a theme and an approach.
These first few meetings were interesting because we had a lot of things to work out that we did not know would come up. We also had different styles of working, I'm pretty much a hothead that dives in head first, eyes wide-open no matter how deep and turbulent the waters. Daryl likes to plan things out in advanced and test the processes. It is a good partnership.
We also had to work around his school schedule and my now full-time artist with brand new routine schedule. Not to forget that we are both married and have spouses to go home to once in a while.

We also had to decide on:

• What matrix to use? We first discussed that PVC stuff, then found out that it sells for $150 a sheet. Too bad because it carves like a dream come true. After some additional discussion and running over the PVC with Daryl's Jeep, we decided on wood. We both liked and had worked with birch plywood. If we had decided on cherry, all the trees remaining in Japan would be shaking in their boots. So birch plywood it was, a full sheet, 3/4" thick.
• Where would we work? After checking out both our studios, we decided to work in mine which prompted me to rearrange a fews things to accommodate the "monster." I have a big front porch and we could carve outside in the beautiful fall weather. And we could "print" right on our driveway, just outside the studio.
• What would we use to print on? Paper? Where would we get such monstruous paper? Here we solicited the help of the Internet again. We found The Paper Web, they would make paper that big. But later discussions included cotton sheets, canvas, even silk and painter's drop cloths... more on that later.

• How would we decide on a theme? We would both sketch something out, then we would get together and figure out how to put our styles together. How could a graduate student in the midst of the academic world and a sort-of-self-trained artist come together and make something decent?
• A few e-mails flew around and we decided that both of us liked to do figurative work. So! Figures it would be.
• Next came the preparatory sketches. Daryl started bottom left, I started top right, we drew separately on newsprint and gave ourselves a week.

• Coming together on process and theme was interesting. Daryl came up with a well drawn out, well thought and completed...drawing! I offered my loose scratches on newsprint. Two completely different styles, but we both liked each other's efforts. The theme came out: "two different worlds, coming together." Just like that.
• Frankly I was a wee bit tired of talking and preparatory stuff and wanted to get my hands on the wood. So we decided I would buy the monster, a 4"x8" piece of deliciously finished 3/4" birch plywood.

 

LEFT PHOTO: Somewhere along the line, we experimented. We made some marks on a piece of wood with a dremmel and a stone grinding attachment that made some nice fluffy cloud-like marks.
RIGHT PHOTO: We also had to, at some point, run over a piece of carved wood, inked, and with paper on top. We did that, came up with a print in just a back and forth drive-over. The blurred print resulted from the tire slipping off the edge of the block, so we decided we would somehow have to prevent that in THE BIG ONE.

• Next time we met, it would be in my studio, vine charcoal in hand.
• I had to rearrange some things in my studio to accommodate the monster wood block. It was about time to make some wall space anyway. We propped the wood against the wall on two plastic crates full of books that had been looking for a good use.
• With sketches nearby. We drew. A picture here is worth a thousand words.

Left picture shows Maria working away, right picture shows a preliminary sketch and the initial drawing on a beautiful piece of wood. Notice (go ahead, click to enlarge the views) the drawing somewhat follows the intricate grain patterns of the birch.

In the left photo Daryl is just a drawing away! The right photo is the unadjusted drawing (click to see full page). I say unadjusted because we later changed some things about the light and dark, brought the drawing together a bit more.

• Drawing along with another artist was also interesting. There are things, I'm sure, that we both would do differently had the drawing been exclusively "ours." Working with someone else requires respect for their art and respect for the person; accommodating ideas and ways of working all the time; listening; most of all, taking the egos out of the picture. I like space and letting the knives and chisels do some talking after the cutting begins. Daryl seemed to prefer to fill the entire picture plane and to plan out every line. In the end, we came up with a decent drawing.
• We then fixed it with two cans of fixative, oiled the whole thing with linseed oil. I was not satisfied with the finished texture, so we proceeded to sand the whole thing with 600-grit wet/dry sandpaper to make it babybottom smooth. A note of interest, the fixative residue and the linseed oil reacted together in the rags and made them hot. The wood, as it dried, acquired a beautiful golden "tan."

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