The Road to Laser Woodblocks I: The Problem of Making

Edward Luper, rough sketch of BT tower from Regents Park, the beginning of an idea for a woodblock print

I had wanted to make woodblock prints for some time, though it was never entirely clear how one was supposed to arrive there. I mean, I made basic woodblock prints, but I'm talking about serious Edo style ones with detail and lots of colours. The prints I admired most seemed to belong to a world in which making was slow, deliberate, and divided between specialists. The drawing, the carving, the printing, each was its own discipline, requiring years of attention. One did not simply begin.

The tradition of Ukiyo-e carries with it a certain completeness. Even now, the finest examples appear effortless, as if the image had always existed in that form. But behind that ease lies a structure that is difficult to replicate. To train as a carver, or a printer, is to commit to a craft over many years. To commission such work is equally demanding, not only in time but in cost.

This question became more immediate when I was approached by a gallery in Ginza, Tokyo. They were interested in work that engaged, in some way, with the language of ukiyo-e. Drawings felt insufficient. Etchings did not quite sit in the right place. Screenprints came closer, but even then there was a sense that something essential was missing. The surface was too even, the process too detached. There is, in a woodblock print, a particular kind of contact, between hand, material, and paper, that is difficult to replicate by other means.

In the end, we showed screenprints and digital works. They did not sell. This is perhaps beside the point, but it clarified something. What I was interested in was not simply the image, but the feeling of the object: the grain of the wood, the slight resistance of the paper, the accumulation of pressure through repeated printing.

I began to look into what it might mean to have blocks made properly. The figures were sobering. A full set, cut by hand, could easily reach into the tens of thousands. More importantly, the system itself did not easily accommodate new or experimental work. I contacted a pair of carvers I had seen on television, who spoke of wanting to collaborate with contemporary artists. In practice, however, it was difficult to justify the labour involved in developing new designs. It is more reliable, perhaps, to reproduce what is already known.

Others were simply too occupied. Workshops specialising in mokuhanga are in demand, and understandably so. Their time is structured around ongoing commitments, and there is little space for uncertain projects. Even when I made enquiries, the responses were polite but distant, or else constrained by practical limitations.

Outside of Japan, the situation was not entirely different. Fabricators tended towards work that was repeatable and commercially stable. The idea of producing a set of blocks for a small, experimental edition did not always align with their model. In one case, I corresponded with someone whose circumstances made collaboration difficult. In another, I received no reply at all.

What emerged from these attempts was not frustration so much as a clearer sense of the conditions under which things are made. Certain forms endure because they are supported: economically, structurally, by systems that allow them to continue. To step into that system from the outside is not straightforward.

I am aware that there are those who would object to what follows. The use of a laser to cut a woodblock risks appearing as a rejection of craftsmanship, or a shortcut taken too quickly. That is not quite how it feels from within. The respect for the traditional process remains, perhaps even more so in recognising its difficulty. But respect alone does not make it accessible. The conditions that sustained the older system: the network of carvers, printers, and publishers, no longer exist in the same way. In their place, one is left to assemble a different structure: artist, machine, printer, gallery.

It is also worth remembering that what now appears traditional was once new. The development of multicolour woodblock printing was itself a technical shift, one that expanded what the medium could do. It is not unreasonable to think that new tools might serve a similar function now, not as replacements, but as adaptations.

It was in this space that the idea of using a laser cutter began to take shape. Not as a solution, exactly, but as a possibility. A way of translating a drawing into wood without passing through the traditional stages of apprenticeship or collaboration. It felt, at first, like a compromise, perhaps even a failure of commitment. But it also suggested another way of working, one that might preserve something of the process while altering its means.

I did not immediately pursue it. The hesitation remained. But the idea had entered the room, and it was difficult to ignore.

In the next part, I began to consider what it would mean to prepare a drawing for such a process: how an image might be broken apart, reversed, and reassembled into something a machine could understand.