Hello this is David Ball wood block printmaker resident in Tokyo. Welcome to my corner.
We are at the moment in Asakusa in Tokyo and literally this is one corner of our shop where
we sell and make woodblock prints. We've been making prints here for many many years and we
make prints on numbers of different themes. We do replicas of old traditional designs we work with
new artists to make new prints as well. We're quite a wide-ranging woodblock workshop but a
few years ago when I was reading my newspaper something I saw in there really caught my eye.
It was a story about the British Museum and the fact that they had acquired at auction a group
of drawings from Katsushika Hokusai whose name needs no introduction. And the interesting thing
from my point of view about this was that these were drawings that had been intended
to become woodblock prints but which for some reason which nobody knows, never went that far.
So here I am sitting on a woodblock print workshop with carvers and printers available
looking at the idea that there are original designs from well over 100 years ago that
didn't make it to the final production stage. One plus one equals… you can add it up. So of
course I got in touch with the British Museum and put the idea on the table that maybe my workshop
could bring that publishing project to fruition after all these years. Now what's involved with
actually doing this? Turning those sketches into prints surely this technology mostly is
lost right? I mean here in the modern world we just don't have the same setup that they would
have had in Edo in the 1840s. Well actually no this is one of the motivating factors of
our workshop. To as much as is possible we stick to the old ways of doing things
so that when I got the copies of these images from the British Museum I knew exactly what
to do. I knew exactly how to start turning these into a finished book. It's a multi-stage process
it involves cleaning up the designs getting them ready for wood blocks actually pasting the designs
onto wood doing the carving moving forward to the printing testing different proofing methods
and ending up with a finished print. This we know how to do. Now the one problem came up right away
the British Museum has over a hundred of these drawings in it’s collection. There's no way I
can take on the challenge of replicating the whole book as it was intended to be done, it
would take us 10 years or more! We can't do that. But luckily the designs in Hokusai collection fall
into a few groups. There's a group for example of pictures depicting the early roots of Buddhism in
India. Another group depicts Chinese legends these are all factors that very much affected
Japanese history and cultural development. Another group is related to the natural world,
something that is never far from a Hokusai brush. And then there's a group of sort of miscellaneous
images. So what we planned on doing is this. We wanted to make a set of twelve prints we thought
this was doable and I'm taking three from each of those four groups the roots of Buddhism, Chinese
Legends, the natural world and the miscellaneous one, it ties in perfectly with our system here.
Because as luck would have it we have three Top Gun carvers here myself, a young imported
apprentice and then the man who helped me when I was learning how to do this, Motuharu Asaka.
So we're going to make this set of 12, mixing the carving styles and mixing the Hokusai drawing
styles and we're going to come up with a set that wraps up in one small set the entire scope of this
book. There's another reason yet, a little bit of a selfish reason why I felt this would be a really
interesting project for me to take on. The other carvers working in Japan these days have spent
all their career making reproductions of ukiyo e prints. They copy Hokusai Great Wave or a Utomaro
beauty or a Sharaku actor. It's been their job now for the last 100 years or so remember there's no
original being created these days so all the men working in the field are carving replicas. Now
what that means is they are carving a woodblock print that was already carved once back in the old
days. But think back to the old days when the original Great Wave was made it wasn't copied
from a woodblock print it was made from Hokusai drawings. So the carvers in the old days face the
different challenge than we do these days. The carver in the old days takes the brush strokes
which could be blurred they could be rough they could be all over the place and translates them
into sharp concisely carved lines. All the men who are living today have never had that experience.
They've simply made copies of things that already became a woodblock print. So this project gives me
a chance to say I can take Hokusai work directly and look at it and think how can I make every one
of these lines into a beautiful carved wood block print it's a once in a lifetime chance for me.
Now those of you who know something about the production of Japanese
prints know something important and they are thinking wait a minute this cannot
be possible. Normally when we're making prints the artist does produce a sketch
and a drawing. Now this sketch drawing is then passed to the carver and as part of
the production process it's pasted on wood and gets destroyed by the carver's knife.
So like I'm going to ask the British Museum send me over to all for these sketches… uh no… you're
not going to get them back! This is obviously not possible but here we are in 2023 and of course
there's a way around this. I'm not going to be able to see the original sketches at all, they
are preparing very high resolution scans and I'm going to receive that data that data I will then
use myself to print out at the appropriate size and the consistency ready to get going and we will
move forward with that. So it is my sample sheets that will end up being destroyed the original
Hokusai designs in the British Museum can rest safely for a few hundred more years. Now this idea
that our main work, our main job is translating Hokusai’s lines into carved lines brings
with it another interesting point. Each carver without being able to control this, each carver
brings his own taste to this. Now I told you a bit earlier we're going to have three carvers working
in this project so is this good news or bad news? Our finished project is going to have the taste of
three men involved we will be creating three different versions of Hokusai drawings this
is going to show us extreme insight into exactly how this happened in the old days we're going to
learn how much of a woodblock print is a designer and how much of a workbook print is the carver.
One really very interesting part of this job and one which astonishes people who come here and see
how we do this, is the minimal level of technology that's required. We see the finished beautiful
Edo-era prints with many colours and beautiful carving and everything else, and we assume
this must be quite a large Factory involved in making these. It's none of the kind. The carving
all happens exactly right here on a small bench like this, a piece of wood, three or four knives,
we have a good light source of course and there's nothing more than this. The knife I mentioned
for example a few minutes ago it's a new piece of steel it's been made by a workshop down the street
here but essentially it's the same kind of tool that would have been used back in the mid-1800s
when this original book was being planned. There's almost no change in the materials, the cherry wood
is the same type of cherry wood the Washi paper of course is the same kind of mulberry paper that
would have been used back in the old days. For as much as possible we are using the original tools
and technologies. There's a few small changes for example the wood blocks we use these days we put
a plywood core on the inside. It doesn't affect the actual printing surface itself which would be
the same as Hokusai printers would recognize but it makes the wood much more stable less likely to
warp. We get more prints out of each given block. But that's the only kind of change we make. At
core it's exactly the same technology as you would have seen in 1840. I say the tools didn't change
very much but actually there's one tool right here which actually we do understand wasn't available
in Hokusai’s day. Of course back in his day there was no electric light flip a switch and you've got
it. They would have been using candles or lamps of some kind or carving in front of a natural window.
We learned that somewhere around the Meiji era, and I'm guessing it must be Meiji because this
obviously looks like a Western influence, here somewhere on the Meiji time the carvers learned
that by preparing a flask full of water the light source coming in could be beautifully
diffused across their surface of their wood and the knife no longer having sharp shadows is much
more clear. But perhaps in Hokusai’s era this was not thought of yet. Think of this; The tool
that the designer used was a brush, a hair brush. The tool that I'm going to use to replicate this
is a steel knife. Now how can I do this? Can I with this piece of steel this hard sharp steel
can I catch all the nuances and subtleties of that little bit of hair dripping ink?
Yes I can! That's part of our job. That's how we live every day looking at the drawing and thinking
where will the knife go where will the knife flow over my hand under my hand how deep to cut.
This is our challenge, this is our pride and the finished results this is our pleasure! Now
it's been about a half a year now since I first contacted the British Museum with the idea that
we could do this, the response was excellent we got busy planning and where are we now? It's now
March 2023 the first print actually is finished I traced it I cut it I printed all the copies
it's out to the subscribers all over the world the second one tracing is finished carving is finished
and as we speak right now the printer upstairs is working on getting a few hundred copies made.
The next one is still being carved.