Sutoku In

So here we are with another year of the 'Hyaku-nin Isshu Hanga Series'. We start with royalty again, this time the well-known Emperor Sutoku. Poetry seems to have played an important part in his life, and he was himself responsible for producing anthologies, although none of them ever attained the fame of Teika's 'Hyaku-nin Isshu'.

It is hard for me to believe that this is the eighth time that I have started out on the year-long journey of recreating ten more of Shunsho's print designs. I can no longer remember much of what my life was like before I started this work; what did I do everyday, when there was no woodblock waiting on my desk every morning?

The blocks for this print certainly were on my desk for a lot of mornings! Although some of the designs in this series have plenty of white space, and relatively 'bare' kimonos, this one is full, top to bottom, and took quite a long time to carve. One thing that added to the carving time was the intricacy of the small patterns. The tip of the knife frequently breaks off when carving small tight curves, and I must spend a lot of time re-sharpening the blade. The sharpening tools sit on the tatami beside the carving bench, and back and forth I go from the woodblock to the stones, many many times each day, not even getting up, but just turning sideways on my zabuton.

Each time I break the tip, it is necessary to first restore the shape of the blade with the roughest stone, then move to the medium stone to put on a fine edge, and finally to spend a few minutes honing on the finest stone to give the blade the required high polish. And just a minute or two later, going round another of the tiny curves in the design, how many times do I hear the tiny 'click' that tells me that the knife has broken again! But I'm nothing if not persistent, and eventually the pattern is finished ...

As I sit and look at the finished print though, I don't really dwell much on the hours it took to make it. When compared with the many years that this print will last, it seems almost irrelevant how many times I had to stop and 'waste' time re-sharpening my knife during the carving. In this sense I am so lucky, that the work I have chosen is one that leaves a clear result behind. For many people, when they are asked the question 'What did you do today?', it is not so easy for them to show an answer. The meals they cooked have been eaten, the house they cleaned becomes dirty again, the 'in-tray' on the office desk is still full of papers ... But I can point to the woodblock on my bench, where each day the carved patch grows larger and larger. Sometimes by only a couple of square centimeters, sometimes more ... And then of course, I can point to the pile of finished prints at the end of the month's work.

So how did I spend this day ... this month ... this decade ...? Sometimes I'm not quite sure if this is all worthwhile, but whenever I get in such a mood I take out my portfolio of prints, and try and reassure myself that yes, that little pile of scraps of paper is indeed worth ten years of a man's life ...

March 1996