Let me share my journey with a piece of linoleum, a blade and an injured thumb.  Yesterday, I woke up and just decided, “Hey, I’m going to carve something and make art.”

If it sounds completely random, well, that’s because it is.  And that’s pretty much the extent of  my sense of adventure and doing new things for the first time.

That includes:

baking a moist chocolate cake,

setting up a new blog (this blog),

moving to a city 8 hours away (by car) to accept a new job, and

cutting my hair to an inch (from shoulder blade length to 1-inch).

Anyway, back to linoblock printing.  I hopped in a cab and headed out to the art store after lunch to get the stuff.   As much as I hate precision, I find carving linoleum rather relaxing, a bit like pottery.  It took me awhile to draw and cut because I had no idea where to run my blade without making an error on the image.  Not much room for error though

FAIL #1: Watered down acrylic paint.

FAIL #2: Direct application of blobs of acrylic paint. Paper dried onto the lino and got stuck.

I used acrylic paints because I didn’t think I needed ink.  The pigment of the acrylics produced cakey bits into the grooves of my carving so maybe that wasn’t such a fine idea so I had to wash my lino immediately before it dried up.  So I ended up going back to the shop, clearing the shelf off the remaining linoblocks on the shelf and bought two jars of ink. And here it is:

Finally: my first linocut print dedicated to our national hero, Dr. Jose Rizal

Even with the casualty, and the reverse thinking in plotting the image, I find linocut printing an exercise in patience, surprisingly soothing, very meditative and simply cathartic.