Written on March 19, 1992 [Permalink]

March 17

TV day, or should say TV morning. They were waiting for me when I came back from the pool, and it was all over in under two hours. They're doing eight segments for a series on the Ome/Okutama area, three filmings today, three tomorrow - they're not wasting any time... The program appears on cable TV channels across the country, at 11:45 weekdays. The 'interviewer' was a typical 'nice' young woman, but the producer was one of the most unpleasant visitors we've ever had. He was an arrogant bugger - he kept calling to her, "Hey kanojo, come over here..." and stuff like that. I was kind of glad to see them go. There was certainly no attempt at getting any kind of understanding of what was going on. Just - get something in the can and get going...

A letter from Margaret Riley of the CWAJ confirming the details for the lecture/demonstration for their group in late May. It's also going to be a trial for a possible hands-on workshop in the fall, if anybody shows interest. I'm going to lose a lot of working time with this one, as I have to ship the tools up to town a couple of days in advance, and will thus lose my carving and printing benches for a while. It seems possible though, that it might lead to something in the way of new subscriptions ...

This is now four speeches lined up for me to give in the next few months: in English - the CWAJ in May and an English circle in Tachikawa in April, and in Japanese - the Hino City Rotary Club in June, and the Hamura Consumer Center in April (two hours!).

March 18

A good carving morning, and finished the hair and face. As the lines on this colour hanshita are really quite blurry, I thought about washing the poem area off the block and replacing it with a 'standard' hanshita done on the local copy machine, before starting the poem carving. I don't need the colour for the lettering, and would rather have the finest possible lines. As I was washing off the paper, I noticed that the black pigment forming the image of the letters was sticking quite strongly to the surface of the wood, while all the paper fibers were falling away from the surface. I was able to remove the entire paper backing, leaving nothing on the surface of the wood but the lettering itself. If it had been a less blurry reproduction, it would have been the most fantastically clear image I've ever carved. I actually had to scrape it off with my fingernail before I could paste down the other version. This is interesting, and if I can get a sharper colour copy, will have to experiment to see if I can do this for a whole design.

March 19

Got a fax today from Ned Herperger, with a bit of a surprise - he wants to buy a set. Talking to him on the phone, it seems that he is really developing an interest in making prints, and also wants to 'be part' of my project. I thought that maybe he was just feeling guilty for the amount of time I have spent with him, but it seems that that's not particularly so ...

I guess I also didn't mention last week that Ishikawa-san phoned and signed up a Mr. Yamada (a friend of his) for a subscription - to start with the April print. This would leave him with a broken set, but Ishikawa-san also said that Mr. Yamada also intended to get 'all the back numbers' over the next couple of years with his bonus money. So that brings us to 39 people - 45 prints each month.

A copy of 'La Vie' magazine came today, with the little story about the 'healthy life' of a Canadian printmaker ... It's interesting to read something at least a little bit different from all the other basically identical stories about the print series.