You’re in good company if you appreciate woodblock prints—Vincent van Gogh, Mary Cassatt, and Paul Gauguin all collected them. Artists who have made woodblock prints include Gauguin, Edvard Munch, Henri Matisse, Wassily Kandinsky, and Marc Chagall. The list continues with Jim Dine, Donald Judd, Helen Frankenthaler, and Roy Lichtenstein. Also called woodcut printmaking, it’s an appealing form for artists who enjoy the craft of carving wood to create images.

While woodblock printmaking existed long before the late 19th century, it wasn’t until masterful examples first arrived in Europe from Japan that Western artists became aware of the form’s artistic possibilities. French Impressionists were enamored with the Japanese woodblock prints shown at the 1867 Paris Universal Exposition, and the influence on their work was considerable.

Japanese prints shaped Austin-based artist Daryl Howard’s work as well. As a young Air Force wife newly stationed in Japan in the early 1970s, Howard dined at the home of an art collector who had been in the country for more than 20 years. “He invited us to his home, opened his safe in his living room, and it pretty much changed my life,” Howard says. “By the end of the evening, I had the combination to his safe and a key to his front door, and I was there for four years.” His collection of Ukiyo-e prints (a particular style of woodcuts from the Edo period) sent her down a new path.

Howard studied printmaking for one year with renowned woodblock artist Hodaka Yoshida, son of the famous Hiroshi Yoshida (an influential artist working in modern Japanese woodcuts). She spent another six months making prints in Japan, and she imported her techniques when she returned to Texas in 1975. Howard has been making woodblock prints for more than 30 years and though she’s made adjustments, her process is not far removed from its origins.

Woodblock printmaking is a relief process, meaning the artist cuts away the parts of the block that are not to be printed. (It’s sometimes confused with wood engraving, in which the print is made from marks incised into the block of wood.) Howard’s pieces are elaborately constructed; she may carve seven or eight blocks of clear heart redwood to create one print. With handmade brushes, she inks the blocks with a mixture of rice paste and watercolors, normally one color per block, sometimes two. The blocks are printed onto Kizuki paper, made of fiber strong enough to withstand the numerous passes through the press that Howard’s prints require.

Using hand-applied, water-based inks allows Howard a lot of flexibility to play with color and saturation—gradations of intensity infuse her prints with luminosity and a sense of atmosphere. Landscapes and architectural details are favorite subjects, many views gathered from travels in the American Southwest and around the world.

Unlike Howard, local artist David Hefner’s inspiration to start making woodcuts didn’t come to him from halfway across the globe —it was delivered in the form of a packing crate. Where someone else would have seen plain old plywood, Hefner saw visions of an alligator gar fish. “I drew on ‘em and then woodburned out and started carving. About halfway through the carve, I thought, ‘I could pull a print from this.’ ” And, for the past eight years, printing from plywood has been his medium of choice.

Plywood doesn’t allow for very fine carving and it isn’t durable, so most woodcut artists would rarely use it. But Hefner searches it out. The patterns he prints from the wood grain are absolutely integral to his work. He prefers the grain patterns found in older pieces of wood, which generally have more visual interest, what he calls “twists and swims.”

An environmentally minded artist, Hefner’s work includes images of local endangered species. He employs the twists and swims to depict water in his prints of flounder, paddlefish, or wading birds, which he wants to present “without abstraction or personification.” Hefner sometimes applies different colors of ink to the plywood by hand, almost creating a painting on the wood from which he then takes a print. Because plywood doesn’t hold up to many runs through the press, Hefner’s editions are small —usually six to 12 prints.

With decades of wood-carving experience, sculptor and printmaker David Everett gravitated naturally toward making woodcut prints. A self-professed amateur paleontologist, Everett’s influences include old Dürer wood engravings, scientific woodcuts, field guides, and ancient Celtic art. “Natural imagery runs all through my work. I grew up in southeast Texas in the woods, swamps, and the Texas coast, looking and absorbing,” he says.

His color prints are often very energetic compositions of Texas animal life in natural settings (a javelina mid-stride, a bird in flight about to eat a dragonfly) and his black-and-white pieces are more fanciful conglomerations of animals (entanglements of frogs or birds, fish, sea turtles, and crabs). Two blocks of straight-grained maple are needed to produce the color prints —one for the color and one for the black overlay; black-and-white prints require only the latter. The prints are made with traditional oil-based inks on a Japanese block printing paper called Okawara. Quite apart from both Hefner and Howard, Everett does not want the grain of the wood to show in his prints. He prefers flat, controlled surfaces to graphically illustrate his views of local wildlife.

Both Everett and Hefner sell their prints at the Davis Gallery in Austin and at the Valley House Gallery in Dallas. Howard sells hers privately and at art shows, including the Armadillo Christmas Bazaar and the Austin Fine Arts Festival.

Galleries/Studios Offering Woodblock Prints:
Name and Locator Number
1550 Gallery
Davis Gallery
Flatbed Press
Daryl Howard
TIPS on Art

By Katherine Smith

Photos courtesy of Daryl Howard (by Esperanza White), Davis Gallery, and David Everett.