The Art - "Water Woodcut"

Water Woodcut

approximately 4" x 8"; ink on paper.


This is the thirteenth piece in my 70-part David's Book (AKA The Blue Book) project. Given my tenuous relationship with the book in it's early stages this is only the sixth piece to be "completed" to my satisfaction. Thankfully I've more or less worked out the kinks with the book, so every piece that I've begun working on from the tenth on is sure to be completed. :D

So watch should I tell you about this piece? Well first off, the idea came fairly quickly. I was playing around with the idea of creating an homage of sorts to Japanese woodcutting. I've always found them to be quite beautiful, as I'm sure everyone else does. I've also found it interesting the way water is depicted in those pieces. Water as power... mutable power; Water as Change. It's all so very striking.

During this time though, I had also wanted to play around with creating something that someone might use as a tattoo. People have requested it of me before... but I've never felt that any of them would be open to collaborating in quite the same way that I would enjoy. It would be more involved and lengthy than I'm sure most consultations are. That said, I still wanted to create something that I felt would make for an interesting tattoo, even if there was no one to use it.

Now, I can't quite conjure up the memory as well as I would like. All I remember is being near the water one day, at the beach. And I don't remember his face... or much of his body. But I remember being at the beach, near the water on a beautiful sunny day when I saw this man with the most amazing shoulders I had ever seen. For me, that doesn't exactly mean they were the most muscular and toned shoulders to grace the planet... they were just perfect. Something about the way the light caught them. Something about their proportion... their color, etc. It just hit me. Then I thought that would make a perfect canvas. If I were to create a tattoo for someone, I'd like it to grace something like that. Then everything else hit me... being at the beach; being near the water; seeing the woodcut form in my mind. That shoulder was the perfect catalyst.

So I went to work and knocked this out. I basically wanted to keep everything as geometric as possible to help allude to the idea of precision... which is one of those watchwords whenever I think "Japanese". At the time I was creating this piece The Brown Book didn't exist, it wasn't even a distant thought. So this is the only piece in David's Book to rely so heavily on rules and guidelines, which I really felt I needed to remain true to the idea of woodcutting. Having that thought in mind I thought I'd keep the piece rectangular, block-like... like a wood block. I also liked the shape because of how well it would work in the "field"... on this phantom shoulder.

Finally I just went ahead and thought about the different states of water. I used the bottom of the piece to communicate the idea of stillness and darkness. I thought of the Abyssal Waters, the Abyssal Dark. Up from this stillness and dark arises the energy... the energy that informs all life. This is the energy the creates the tides... and so I depicted this "wave of energy" atop the stillness. From then on I just went ahead and drew the tidal waves, the mist, the fog and the rain. All pretty simplistic. And for the subject in mind, I think apt and perfect. A great surfer's tattoo... perfect for the beach. I'm pretty happy with the way this one turned out. ;)

DS333, happy.