Written on June 25, 1990 [Permalink]

June 22

Grinding away at the kimono patterns on Hitomaro [2-5]. In the evening, moistened the remains of the 80 sheets ready for another stab at the Dainagon Kinto printing tomorrow morning.

June 23

I might as well not have bothered. It was if anything, even worse than last week. This time I went to about 30 sheets before giving up in disgust. No matter how much sumi I swabbed over the block surface, the impressions all came out patchy and faint. These are worse than the stuff I made back in Canada, about nine years ago! I'm getting worse not better!

In desperation I called up Matsuzaki-san and asked if I could take the block and some paper over to his place for a demonstration. He said there would be no problem so I headed downtown, getting there about four o'clock. In a word, the problem was water! My paper was way, way too dry, and the ink and water on the block was also way too dry. He just laughed at the amount of moisture in my sheets, swabbed a full waterbrush over the face of a few sheets, and jammed them under some soaking wet cardboard. Ten minutes later thay were ready to print. I could hardly hold them over the block, as they were so full of moisture it was like holding a wet tissue. I was amazed at this, because each time I have felt that the moisture was a bit too 'much', the resulting prints have come out with a very blotchy appearance. It turns out that the way to avoid that is to have more water on the block - along with more pigment - and more paste! He put more sumi on the block than I've ever put on 10 blocks, along with a glob of sticky school kid's paste, and then dipped the brush in water before mixing everything. The result was a gooey sticky black mess smeared all over the surface of the block. He put a sheet of the soppy paper on top and mashed it down with his baren. I just sat there with my jaw hanging down, as I was sure that we'd see nothing but a smeared mess when he took it off. It was magnificent. The black is a rich deep tone, there is no 'tamari' anywhere, and the thin white lines of the pattern are all completely clear. I couldn't even speak, and he just grinned at me!

He did a couple more and then I tried a few, getting pretty much the same result, but with a bit more smearing in the thin white lines, which he attributed to my brush being a bit stiff. I have no idea how this can possibly work - there is such a contrast between the gross mess on the block and the clean appearance of the print. I made a bunch of notes on details of his paper moistening techniques, and general procedures, and then he got back to work on his own stuff, a run of 300 copies of one of the prints in the Tokaido series being put together by Kajikawa-san. It'll take him about 10 days to do the whole job, about 15 colours. He'll get 600 yen each ...

He packed it in at about seven o'clock, and we spent the next few hours drinking beer, eating his wife's tasty cooking, and talking about the business, before I had to head off home (getting there at about 12:30). He's really a neat guy, and I can't thank him enough for the help and encouragement he has given me

June 24

The big. test - can I do it 'on my own', without him preparing the paper and laying out the sumi, etc....? Prepared 30 sheets in the morning. When I checked them 30 minutes later, and prepared to lay them out in the 'staggered' way that he had dictated, I found that they had pretty much dried out! So ... more water, more wet newspapers, and back into the stack. By mid-afternoon it seemed ready, so I had a go at it. The result .... not bad. Not quite as good as his printing yesterday, but far, far better than what I had been doing before. The black is not as deep and rich as he made, but at least it is even, without white patches or streaks. The next problem now, is how to get the moisture down to a level where the colours will go on smoothly, without shrinking the paper size enough to screw up the registration.

June 25

Colours on the 30 sheets, no problems. I had been worried that I would have registration problems because of the moisture, but there was no difficulty. Actually, the areas of colour on this print are so small that some mismatch in block size would go unnoticed. Printing a colour area that extended across the full width of the block may offer more problems I sent a copy off to Matsuzaki-san, to see if he has any comments on the printing.

A phone call came in about noon from a Mr. Iwaji of Asahi Television. He read about me in the Jiji magazine a couple of months ago, and wanted to see if I was amenable to their doing a spot on my work. Of course, I said that I would be pleased to have them do this, and he said that he would 'get back to me later'.