Fujiwara Yoshitaka

Our third print of the year is the son of Kentoku-ko, another member of the Hyakunin Isshu. He was born in 954, some 997 years before me, and could he have imagined that after a millenium had passed, a Canadian printmaker would be carving his image? Impossible, of course ...

Many of his poems are represented in imperial anthologies, as well as being preserved in his own collections. His son became the famous calligrapher Fujiwara Yukinari. But I suspect that the father perhaps didn't have much chance to give the son guidance on such things as poetry and calligraphy - for this month's poet, Fujiwara Yoshitaka, died at twenty-one years of age ...

It has been about five years since I wrote in one of these little essays about the changes I was making when I carved the hair on some of these prints, explaining that because my prints are a larger size than the originals, I re-draw the hairs on a finer scale. At that time I started to draw the hanshita so that there were 30 hairs in each centimetre - 3 per millimetre. Since that time, I've pretty much stuck to that scale, gradually getting better at getting the hairs carved smoothly and evenly.

When I was preparing the hanshita for this month's print though, I thought that it was perhaps time to try and take another step, so I drew it in such a way that there would be 40 hairs in each centimetre - 4 per millimetre. After pasting it down on the cherry wood, I started to have second thoughts about this - I couldn't even see the individual hairs. But after 'warming up' on the kimono patterns, the time came to carve the face, so I hunched down with my nose almost touching the block, and gently sliced the wood away, one hair at a time.

Once it was done, and I was inspecting the finished work, I felt that it had turned out fairly well, and maybe you the collectors will be pleased with it ... but I know one group of people who would not be very impressed if they could see it - the carvers who lived in the Meiji-era. By their standards, my work is uneven and sloppy.

Those men had two 'advantages' over me: the wood they had available was really quite a bit harder and more fine-grained than that which we get nowadays, but more importantly, those men were carvers - they didn't spend time printing, or writing stories, or browsing the Internet, or helping their kids with homework. They just carved. They lifted their craft to an astonishingly high level of skill.

Of course, I will never be able to 'catch' them. But in these years to come, I'm going to have a lot of fun trying!

April 1998