Beginnings (part 1)

good morning this is what block printmaker Dave ball speaking to you from a new place for these video presentations my little corner of our new shop on the ground floor of the mocha Hong Kong building in a sock so here in Tokyo it has been far too long since the previous video and for that I apologize those of you who have been following our activities on various social media platforms know the main reason behind this delay the work to build this beautiful new shop but we're up and running now and I have run out of excuses it's time for a video what to talk about Donna what kind of video to make I'd like to do another process video showing the scenes of colors we've got one coming now the colors building up and up on the upcoming new QA heroes print times and burn bright but actually our staff members cameron san and sukhasana printer are working on that one already she's going through the colors one by one by one they're recording it up on the third floor and as soon as she's got to the end of the process on all the clips are in the can that video will be coming to you right away so for me should I do another one of those David's choice videos or I pick something from our collection or show more shop and show it to you I've got lots of prints waiting in the wings but we just had one of those videos I don't want to get too repetitive here actually though I should just come out and admit it what people have been asking for in emails in person here in the shop and in comments on the YouTube channel what people are asking for is another one of those rambley story type videos like the one I told a while back about it was Cicero the old Carver idea me too you know I'd love to do another one of those but I've been kind of hesitant to try it again because I don't really know if I can come up with another story that could come out quite as well as that one did that was so cool you know it started quietly it rolled along gathering itself as it went it had a bit of drama I mean ito-san died partway through and it rounded out so nicely at the end it had video clips for me to show interesting tools to include ivory watched that ting myself in a kind of amazement wow what a neat story so I've been afraid of trying again I've got an endless number of episodes people I've met influenced by and the things that have happened but how to turn them into such a wonderful story so you see where I'm at with this it's that old catchphrase the perfect is the enemy of the good I've so much one or two - another great video but I've ended up doing nothing there's only one way out of it it's time just it dig it in my file of potential video ideas just grab something that looks like it might be fun and interesting to talk about and whether or not it wraps up into a perfect story just don't worry about that well that's what I've done over the past few days I've gathered something together and I'm gonna talk to you about the very first woodblock prints I ever purchased they were they are they're absolutely fantastic and beautiful objects and it's a set of four large prints and without question the minute that I caught sight of these prints the very minute was a moment that changed my life and then when you think about how events cascade down the years and everything we've built since then it turns out that it wasn't just my life that was changed that helped tell a story as before I've gathered the prints themselves along with some other items that might help illustrate the stream of events and although there will be no perfect resolution to the story this time around let's just give this a try are we ready you this story begins on a rainy day in Okayama in western Japan it was actually my first ever trip to Japan it was in I think the winter of 1981 the 1982 I'd been living in Vancouver and I just finished a huge programming job for the music company that had been working for on and off for ten years and for a year or so I've been living with a young Japanese woman who would later become the mother of my kids so no I had met her on the transcontinental train that runs across Canada I had been living in Toronto for a couple of years and when my term of the music store finished there and I was going back to Vancouver I thought rather than fly across which I'd done a hundred times before I'd take the train and take it slow life-changing decisions in the seat next to me was this young lady who was travelling around North America and I'm not sure if she caught my eye because she was Japanese or just whatever because she was the young lady I don't remember the reason I ask that is because when I had been living in Toronto I had started to develop an interest in things Japanese I'd been living alone so I've been going out to restaurants and Japanese food really really caught my eye and it was just suited to me the portions were small it looked beautiful so I'd been in the habit of going to Japanese restaurants here and there while here in there Jenai many days a week and on one particular day while going to the restaurant I'd been a bit earlier than I think I've been intended to go and walking down the street it was on Dundas Street in Toronto there was a gallery called the Stuart Jackson gallery it was a tiny little hole in the wall gallery and they had a little display of Japanese woodblock prints I guess there must have been a sign outside come and see our Japanese woodblock prints I had no knowledge of them no interest no nothing just I was on word for dinner but here it was go inside and take a look and he had some stuff on the wall and I don't even remember now what it was because I didn't understand him well enough to understand what I was looking at but I did understand that wow this stuff it was beautiful he had them lit the same way that we light prints in our gallery here these days we've got a nice side light and the prints look quite spectacular you know and I remember nothing about a conversation what are these Japanese woodblock prints whatever whatever and if I said that at that moment I decided I was gonna become a Japanese woodblock print maker that wouldn't be true it's totally of course not true but some kind of seed went into my mind and it's something that was too first later on was planted that day anyway as I said I finished my tour in Toronto I was coming back to Vancouver and maybe the Japanese food and the prints I'd seen created an interest I don't know but talked to the young lady and we talked a bit more we talked a bit more and by the time we got to Vancouver three days later it was game over we started living together and one thing led to another she was studying English trying to get a medical certification she was gonna be a registered nurse and I was spending my time studying what was then called microcomputers to see if I could figure out how to get involved with them you know it was before the era of what we were now called personal computers they were called micro computers so she's doing her studies I'm doing my studies I've got some free time give it a try to make some woodblock prints like the ones I'd seen in the gallery back there now this is pre-internet maybe I went to the library there's nothing there was absolutely no information about how to do this but Canadian culture you know you don't look for a teacher you sort of think about how can I do it myself it's a DIY culture so I got a piece of wood I know the power spectra living in had a fireplace upstairs that people lived up there had a fireplace and their wood storage was down in the basement so I grabbed some kind of piece of wood from it tools I had none and didn't even know what real tools were so it was a cutter knife that was lying around the house when it came time to try and print the thing I used to write scoop that we had there just scattered random tools the first one I made I don't have it because at the first moment I made it it was like oh my god this is so awful the ones I looked at looked so beautiful how difficult could this be it's wood color and paper the first one just went straight back into the fireplace right away but something in my character a little bit stubborn who knows whatever I don't really know why I decided to try again okay so I've got some of those early samples here now David here isn't an artist and he knew he wasn't an artist but whatever this idea about making prints so he tried it two ways one way I'll get another camera here I can't show you and hold this up easy so I'll get another camera here and I'll show you this way you can see this it's not an original print it's a Japanese design and what I had done that I must have gone to the library or something got a copy of a Japanese print traced it and tried to cut it out and whatever it's recognizable as the woodblock print there's chips and pops here it's on some kind of junk paper that I must have had it's a terrible mess but there it is it's the start of a kind of a long journey and then again I don't really remember my way of thinking but I followed it with a few others that I had tried to design myself now by this time clearly now I'm looking at some kind of library book and I've seen prints like a sheen hungar prints or something like that and he could see there's an attempt to make a full moon or a beautiful deep sky and it says here under the moon five view is five years under a full moon so I was you know I've been looking at prints and trying to think about this I had no idea yet of the fact that you could separate the idea of designing prints and making prints it was just totally experimental as I said she was spending her day studying and I was spending my days and evenings fooling around with these little scraps of paper look at this is another one I didn't finish my five years of the Moon this is five use of Japanese architecture Wi-Fi if I have no idea doesn't matter who knows they were fun fun experiments what a day-by-day life with her went along rolling along at some point in that winter 1991 she and I decided to take a trip to Japan for her she had to go and see your family and do some paperwork related to her immigration to Canada and for me it was my chance to get my first look at that really really fascinating country I enjoyed food I did enjoy chatting with this girl I was making woodblock prints by devoting Japan when we got there we got a cheap train pass we were young enough at that time to qualify for the young young train passes and we headed up north first I think we made a longest tour that would end up in her family's place and riah Prefecture and we timed that for the New Year's so we would spend a New Year season at her family's place and then once our obligations they were done we traveled around towards Western Japan and it was while we were down in Okayama that lightning struck lightning struck it was a total rainy day it was just pissing down there was just raining everywhere he came out of the train station oh my god what are we gonna do just whatever there was a department store in from the train station in we went just to get out of the rain don't you know anything about Japanese department stores they are worlds of them and then themselves they have everything it's food down in the bottom it's art galleries up at the top it's funeral parlors wedding your neighbor you can get anything you want in a Japanese department store so whatever we're hanging in there just looking around think it's mostly keeping out of the rain as I said excuse me there's some we're up near the top of the thing there must have been some kind of display of art and I think it was a traveling salesman he brought prints woodblock prints of different kinds he had them up there he was doing what what you'd call a spot sale and this set of prints was on display there and this as I said in the intro to this video this was the thing that was absolutely a life-changing experience I didn't know it at the time but it clearly that's what it turned out to be again I'll use the side camera here rather and try and flip and flip and flip all the way around it's the artist named Okada Yoshio I couldn't read this at that time and it's the Genji enmity and what this is it's a set of four woodblock prints based on the Tale of Genji series and what was happening this was 19 I forgot my year I told you what it was 1991 or something before this in the 1970s a Japanese newspaper had run a series on a Sunday series about the Tale of Genji it's an old Japanese novel written or whatever a thousand years ago they talked about it as being the first novel in the world ever read written by a young woman we now call I don't I've forgotten her name mota sake Murasaki she's about sorry about that excuse me you can see the holes in my research here anyway it doesn't matter we're talking about the woodblock prints the series had run in a series of sunday supplements for one year and some enterprising publisher and the company was called nude oh the man's name was psyche Shinichi he became a friend of mine later at that time nothing about this he had seen that newspaper series and said there's something here we've got to make some woodblock prints out of this he contacted the artist and or the newspaper company got together and anyway they ended up making a set of four woodblock prints on these pictures I heard later on that they had actually planned maybe to make a series of the whole fifty odd pictures but they didn't get past it for too much talk let's show you these pictures I don't know they're gonna have the same impact on you that they had on me but my god they are just incredible again like I said well use the side camera the word you're seeing here is Auto and each of the lady characters in this book is labeled not with a real name they may not actually even had real names they're labeled with some item from the scene in which we first see them this young lady first comes to the attention of the hero of the book in an evening scene surrounded by fireflies and this is the woodblock print that resulted and I spent a half an hour describing it to you I need to do this it's just incredible it's based on the old Ewa traditions in the sense that it's lines carved and then filled in with flapped color in the areas this is the idea about making all these prints but look what they've done of course she's behind a transparent curtain here translucent curtain they've arranged the color blocks in such a way that we get this sense of transparency although of course there's no curtain actually here on the paper I could talk all night about it things like this at the bottom of the print here they've tried to do a depth to show the darkness of the room and they've done it with carving extra bucks to go on top and then adding gradations from the bottom all these effects on the back this is not poor printing these are carefully calculated ways to add depth to this print with us in Japanese what printmaking we don't print with white we can't apply light to a print the way we create light is by surrounding it with darkness these Firefly illuminations what you're seeing is the paper showing through surrounded by a darker area I saw this sitting there along with its competitors what's your show you in a minute Donna I just had not ever imagined that there could be such a thing let's look at the others one by one here quickly that's Hotaru the first one this second one is Akashi it's again the name of the label it's applied to one of the other characters in the book I still get a kick every time I see these things I still get a kick out of these you know just the pleasure just does not stop the number of colors and the blocks the hair here it's sort of a fantabulous hair it's a mix of stuff Okada Yoshio himself likes this style of just adding hair and hair and hair and then back in the era itself any pictures or sketches we have from the handied I always show cascading hair like this whether these women actually had such long hair or whether it was a convention I don't know and again layers and layers for the depth the the rusty color you see here the the Vermillion pigment which is a kind of mercury is starting to oxidize and to lose some color and I'll try and do a b-roll later where you can see some of these these patterns are printed in a gold pigment that perhaps not so visible here under under this assigned camera beautiful beautiful beautiful prints the next one in this series of four is the character called walk on up now this is perhaps the least dramatic of the four pictures it's the same kind of style we're looking at a young woman in here and again it seems to be all about the hair Okada Yoshio style is not something that everybody likes I've learned this in the intervening years oh the way he draws women's faces it seems to be kind of attractive and appealing to two men western men specifically and some of the Japanese women I've talked to over the years really don't find this attractive irrespective of the content of this my interest in these is just the drop dead beauty of the physical object we are looking at here pigment on paper it's just incredible the scale the size of them the number of colors that go on it was an insane project to take on they sold the prints at that time I think there were just over eight eighty thousand yen which at the time would have been about fifteen hundred dollars in our currency look at this one matsukaze which translates literally as pine wind maybe it's the breeze through the pines is the feeling about this young lady's nickname and look at this thing it's simple it's stripped down to bare essentials we have a woman a scrap of clothing and some hair is it too erotic I don't know I don't think there's anything nasty about this it's sort of pure eroticism and it's all about the line going right back to you a three hundred years ago it's all about the line the flowing line and yes I said I saw them I should put one up here so we can see it in the light shot the talk let's put this one up here I saw them there and she and I looked at them I don't remember her reaction to these but my reaction was as I said just changed my life we didn't buy them right there that rainy day you can't walk around rainy Japan with a bunch of what about prints in your hand and anyway they were too expensive we didn't have money in her hand time goes by tongue goes by we get back to Joe to Tokyo a few weeks later and I arranged to visit the publishers office he was hugely friendly to me and it's funny I don't quit he really white know why we were just some random traveler I saw your prints can I buy a set here please no so he got him out on the table when we put the money on the table and we bought the set of prints but I must have talked to him about the fact that I was interested in making Japanese prints and the reason I know that is because we came home from that trip with a bunch of wood blocks from his outfit not carved wood blocks blank pieces of wood stamped with his name that he'd ordered for his own production capabilities so I must have told him that I was planning on doing this and he helped support me by getting some of these supplies and he gave me a couple of other really really neat things that day he gave me a copy of the book that had been made after the newspaper series was published a book was published later in the next year with the full set designs as you know as they were as they appeared in the newspaper these are not woodblock prints these are just pictures that appeared in as they were did in the newspaper and for example if we show you the one that we just reduced it as a woodblock print here again side camera this is the image that became the print the Hotaru the Firefly print and you can see this is a watercolor painting this is not a woodblock print and Psyche son and his craftsmen took this and adapted it into the print that you saw a moment ago this was a treasure for me he gave it to me it's getting a bit worn nowadays I have looked through this I looked through this any number of times it's quite nice it's got the Okada son's signature the front and also the signature the lady who did the Japanese text Tanabe Seiko she was a noted author at the time but he gave me something else much more closely related to my work he gave me an old wood block and for him it was just something that was junk his publishing company had been in business for I don't know decades and decades and decades they'll be going on since at least the tile era and he gave me one of the wood blocks that they were getting ready to throw out into the scrap heap it's the key block to one of the prints in the famous tolk Idol series again I should add angle it for this side camera here to get a better view on it it's the print called chiju now please understand this is not an original hoax here oh she gave era wood box in the 1860s this is from a reproduction that was made in the Taisho era and i guess i don't know why he gave it to me it was obviously it's out of you said split and cracked and popped and warped and a totally unusable but for me over the years since I got this especially in the early years it's been an absolute treasure trove I've learned so much you might think what can you learn from carving by looking at a block but you can when you get it under the scope and under a lens and look at this you can see the angle that guy's hand moved the way he did this you can see the way that some of it was carved without turning the block these days jokers like me were carving we turned the block around turn the block around turn the block around the top carvers in the old day didn't do that they put this block bang on their table and they'd carve it was moving at only a minimal amount and then when it goes to the printer a block that's carved that way is so easy to print because the angles are all smooth and the pace just sweeps off the block it's a master class in wood block carving an absolute master class I learned a huge amount from it back then I haven't looked at it too much in recent years but now that I think about it it may be time to get it out and start looking at it again an absolute treasure for him it was just going to go in the trash it's quite thin and what probably happened he wasn't able to tell me this because he didn't know whether history of this particular piece of wood our wood blocks usually are about 23 millimeters thick you carve something on it then the key block would only be carved on a one side if you carve too much from both sides the block warps a little bit too much for a key block so it would have been carved on one side and then when it wore out they would have planed it down to this thinness and carved another image on it and once it gets this thin you can't carve it down and plane it again so this is probably the second pass for this specific piece of wood oh my god it's even it even sounds like music anyway anyway I'm rambling much too much this I go back to Canada with her we've had a totally fun time in Japan I'm going back with this beautiful set of prints and these little souvenirs and things and printmaking now for me is well it's still hobby I want to try this but it's a hobby with a bit more to it not because I can see this though I've got a goal look at this how beautiful they can be can I do that it was impossible but over the next couple of years I tried making some some different kinds of prints I've got a few more than here some of them were again they were reproductions of Japanese original designs of Japanese traditional designs and some of them were things that I was trying struggling to think about myself and that that what's the word that that stress between these two things is a major factor through my whole printmaking life especially in the early years I like making stuff I like cutting pieces of action for these for the camera hands like I like making stuff I like cutting pieces of wood and mucking with pigments but when it came time to sit there and draw stuff it just clearly wasn't in my skill set you know and again I didn't at this time understand clearly the the whole world in Japan was different designers could design and Carver's could happily carve I still didn't grow without that fact anyway moving along moving along among the things I tried making a sample prints was this one you might remember this right you just saw it a minute ago let me move some stuff out of the way here I went back to old cutter Sam's book dug up another one of the designs here let's see if I can find it here this one this is the Akashi design and I traced over it and I made my own version of course you can laugh whatever whatever it's nowhere near as good as that but this is still early years for me again there's no internet no books no nothing just trying to have a go at getting out of love how this all might work okay now where is all this going how are we gonna tie this together where did we end up in a sock so here I thought I'm in Vancouver there was really not just me with interests in Japan interests in Japan was in the air there was a group called the MOCA yokai do you Thursday group and it was a group of business people and maybe Japanese expatriates and people who had interests in Japan they wouldn't meet up a couple times a month drinking with a sock a drink a bit a beer cha-cha-cha talk about Japan share experiences whatever just a Japanese fan club has it work I helped with some of the activities the group put on a little festival and help support the Japanese festivals are going on in town so the people in the group knew of my interest in this knew of my interest in wood printmaking and in 1985 there was a big big sort of festival down by the waterfront there called the Asia Pacific festival with groups and activities and stuff from all over Asia and somebody there knew of me through Mo Kio kind said Dave will you do a demonstration of Japanese woodblock print making the blind leading the blind whatever there's nobody else in town who can do such a thing so I said sure whatever I'll take it on as long as we don't pretend that I'm a printmaker I'm just gonna sort of show what I can about how this might work yeah yeah anything you want anything you want they're looking for people to fill up their boots I said I'd do it and I had a devious it's not I had another agenda in mind I'd been playing with this and making them and some of the people around me said he that looks cool you know can I have one or something like this and I was starting to think about the possibility could I actually at some point if I could get my skills together could I become a printmaker could I make these things and sell these things so I thought that asia-pacific festival would be a really cool test of doing this that show my friends and if somebody said can i buy this you know it would be a test of all this now the thing is that when you've got a traditional image like this this is all hot accordion is there's no copyright it's way way out of corporate I can clearly cut this and sell this it's public domain stuff excuse me I can't do that with this this is owned by somebody else this was all kind of stuff I could play with it by making a reproduction like this but I certainly couldn't sit there and sell these things so I came up with the idea I wrote a letter I wrote it to Saiki son back in Japan he was the only contact I had there I wrote a letter asking if he could put me in touch with ocala son maybe I could get permission to to sell some of these things after all Okada son had clearly done this sort of thing before having prints published and I've got a copy my letter here I like it look at this it's actually a letterhead we're thinking David ball fine woodblock prints jumping the gun a little bit our thing whatever anyway anyway in there I outlined a plan that I said it I was still an amateur I'm gonna do this sort of festival if I was gonna sell these for a few bucks each would it be okay to pay him a royalty or you know what what would what would be the deal one week's go by two weeks ago by three weeks go by I was thinking oh I'll tear this they've ignored me but only hold a letter comes from Okada some handwritten beautifully done in English I spoke to him later on when I get to know him he doesn't speak English at all so he must have had somebody do this for him as he dictated mr. David Bull I have looked at your works and was very impressed so I will certainly accept your selling the prints but I will have to ask you to sell them under these conditions number one the number of prints must be limited to three hundred number two you must pay two hundred and seventy thousand yen by October 1985 if you have any more questions or desires please be sure to let no I wish you all the luck I had really mixed feelings about this Wow he's okay he says he was impressed he'll accept me selling the Prince must be okay but the terms he said at that time in Canada two hundred seventy thousand yen is like five grand it was way more than what I had said I was gonna try and sell the Prince for about the festival so clearly he didn't want me to go ahead with this project in the way that I had said okay no problem with of course I did you know I put his prints aside I did the festival with my own little simple reproductions and traditional prints I don't remember at this point my bookkeeping and stuff is all in storage long long long ago so I don't member how many I sold we did sell a few and there was some interest in it and I took that interest and tried to grow it that year I went to half a dozen what they call craft fairs or crafts festivals I got a little wooden frame with some curtains and some tables and some posters and I did half a dozen or so craft festivals all over the Lower Mainland in BC it was a time maybe they're still doing it when that kind of a thing was they were all over the place summer festivals autumn festivals winter Christmas Festival I sold a few prints but I learned something really really really important as much as I like you know making these things mucking around with wood and carving and playing with the paper it's sure not so much fun trying to sell let me get your truck and get your thing you drive here you drive there you try to talk to people I know it really really wasn't something wasn't a sensible idea and when you look at it now there shouldn't have been any discussion in my mind I had a not so bad job you know I was working for the music store by this time I'd been on and off for them for ten years but by now I was actually the general manager of the whole company the boss had put me in the corner office he'd gone off to do finance and vision and I was actually running the place I was getting a music hit I was playing baritone sax and flute in an amateur jazz band even made a couple of Records I had two kids babies three years old one year old the boss one day he brings me and says Dave you're doing really well here it's looking good I'm getting give it older tell you what do you want to deal in for a part of the company everything was looking just set I should just work at the music store and do printmaking as a hobby common sense but-but-but you're a drug addict you're a drug addict I'm sorry whatever it I say I couldn't forget these things I couldn't put him aside I wanted to do this so I wanted to do it well so I don't know crazy or not I still don't know I came up with this plan here's what to do save up for a bunch of time and quit the job in the music shop take the wife and kids hop on a plane get over to Japan somehow get accepted into the country by immigration you know they don't just let anybody walk in the door but whatever figured out that when we get there find a place to live that's an easy enough wonderful rented apartment how to make a living well wood bought prints I mean give me a break you don't suddenly just jump into Japan and start so he what about prints but I had an in I spoke English and of course in Japan there's huge demand for English teachers all the time so I thought what we could do is in our apartment there make one roommate Oh an English classroom and get students in we could make a living at this and then I would teach English I would work in my spare time and improving my printmaking skills and then and then of course I couldn't see that far but it seemed like a plan so first step I wrote I visited the Japanese Consulate in Vancouver to see if I can get some kind of like student visa or culture visa whatever that would allow me to stay in Japan my application went in and a couple of weeks back whatever phone caller just to me I remember rejected refused no explanation I call up please please no I'm sorry it's been refused in recent years I've learned actually why back then they don't explain yes or no but I've learned in recent years that what they were looking for for anybody in that era for anybody who wants to come into Japan to do this you need as a basic ground rule you need a university degree they're trauma sort of filtered you know people they won't dumb people they don't want and I have no university degree at all still don't so that was what put me on the outside of that anyway crazy or not I still can't answer but I did it anyway permission or not one day that spring I spoke to Bill the owner the music shop when I gave him three months notice I told him that I would be leaving to try this to his credit he didn't laugh at me outright you know he said later I spoke to me years after he's you know when I heard that conversation I knew you'd been interested in doing this I know you're gonna try it he said I gave you in my mind I gave you about half a year six months or so then I thought you'd be back looking for your job or something you know six months well it's been what 32 years and counting so perhaps we can assume but it won't actually be heading back to the music store so what we're gonna do is we're gonna wrap this up here for now this is not obviously the complete story my beginnings to this shop in a sucks but what I'm gonna do with this video is can repeat in two videos we've done the first part some of my beginning through some of the prints things that had a relation to Okada Yoshio he influenced me quite a lot what we're gonna do then is we're gonna wrap this up here that little family has just left everything in storage in Canada they've touched down at the airport they're walking towards the immigration counter what will happen we'll leave this here now the next video will be part two where you go back to the beginning again and this time we're gonna look at prints and influences that came to me through Adachi a summer the guy who runs the adoption workshop who also had a huge influence on me in the early years so that's how part 1 and part 2 of this video series are going to mesh together so what kind of wrap it up but before I do I've got to show you a couple more things because they're absolutely related to Okada some roalvang from what I told you and after I was up and running as a printmaker that's not a spoiler you know where this is all gonna end up but after I was up and running as a printmaker I did get a chance to meet Orkut asan they'd been a newspaper story about my work or something in his local newspaper and he said oh my god he's here that guy I forget his name whatever you know anyway he saw the story about me called up psych he's on the publisher of these prints and said look come here can we go talk to this guy Saxon called me we set it up can you come on over and there they are one day sitting at that the kids are gone to school and the Okada son said my my kitchen table and we're sitting and chatting and I don't remember you know the exact words and stuff we said but I remember a couple of things from a conversation that I will never forget I'm like what do I talk this guy but he's a world-famous artist and I'm you know whatever nobody nobody we've got the book that he gave me we got on the table I've got it open perhaps it's to this cuz this is one of the images that had quite a name Dommy I've got it open what do I talk to sky pod so I said something like you know these images of yours I it's really interesting how they show the foreground object is large we've got the topic in the background and it really looks as though there's been some influence from akira kurosawa the movie director and he behaved as though i had hit him with a shotgun he just bang back in his seat his face goes sort of blank and I thought oh Here I am you know I've told him his work is derivative and now I'm in big trouble and whatever under that wasn't it and again I don't remember the words he said but I remember vividly that kind of thing he said he said like I've been doing this since before you were born I've had exhibitions all over the country I've made thousands of designs we've had books published my work has been exposed all through this country this is the first time that anybody has ever got to the bottom of what I'm trying to do and I'm like I thought it was kind of obvious and whatever and this is a really really interesting cultural thing going on here me I could feel free to make this comment to him even though perhaps when you think about it it could be considered to be an insult his work is derivative of Kurosawa son I didn't think so but it could be thought of that way and that's what would stop Japanese people from ever being able to say something like this they've been to his exhibitions and they said wonderful or wonderful or wonderful and he said thank you thank you thank you and it's never any content you're not allowed to do that because it could be taken as criticism so in all the thousands of people he'd talked to he'd never heard this before I thought it was obvious and he said yeah he we talked about he said my god I've got them all on VHS tape I've stopped frame by frame every one of those videos I've studied how he did it what's foreground what's background will you pull the focus I spent my life trying to make images as good as his movies you know so we start talking have a grand time maybe my wife bring some beer on the table and we're chatting away there we go to snuff is not we had a good time and part of the conversation was he'd seen my work and maybe he was thinking David's a bit better but probably not there yet so we didn't make any plans for this but we left it in the air that at some point in the future he and I would would do something together we use some of his designs for some of our prints or Adeste our but at that time I was a single solo craftsman so uh we're still waiting nothing has happened yet we're still waiting he's getting older I'm getting older will it happen don't know we'll see how it goes no promises can I do this can I say this at all just one more thing just one more thing he called me again some years after this and I thought maybe he wants to work together and no it wasn't that it was something really really different he was downsizing his home he's getting older as I said and you know whatever you downsize they were tearing their building down putting up a smaller building he's got a lot of stuff in the house he had to get rid of he'd known of my interest in these prints and what he said on the phone was would I be interested in having the full block set to this full set of woodblock prints and I'm like would I be interested in owning the block set to this woodblock prints I'm like whatever I'm over at his front door before I drop the phone on at the cradle what did we rented a truck and got over there and yeah he was downsizing he had no room for them so of course of course of course I said yes yes yes I've got them they've been in my all my work room now for for a decade and a half or something I brought one set here here to show you to chat about the each of the block sets comes wrapped with some trial proofs and stuff like this and some sample printings and I tell you I mentioned about that Taisha woodblock whatever I did with it as a master class in carving this is a master class in I I don't know what to say let me just tell you the story again I use the side camera I pull up whatever the first block from the first print that the girl is here we've got a face and key model but the first block I pull up what do we have here well there's her faces carved eyes and nose there's some eyebrows for there's another pair of eyebrows there's another pair of her eyes carved here over here there's a face has been carved and then chopped off there's another face here there's another couple of eyebrows under here that's the final version of the face you get what we're going out with this these guys these four the publisher who said we want to make prints that will rock the world the designer that said those old ook you guys think they're pretty that I'm going to show them how we can design real prints the Carver who is you know following this the printer these men had a vision you know we can make something that's never been here before and of all the lessons I've learned from all the people I've met and from whatever's mixed up with my own DNA this is the number one lesson think of something that can be done study work practice get together with people who are the best people you can find and then just don't give up try it cut it off cut it try it cut it off carve it at some point you got to do that famous movie thing cut print call it a day but push it push it push it push it this is the lesson that I learned from these blogs and from what I've learned from these men maybe that's a little melodramatic a little bit over the top that's it that's me and that's these things we've got collected here and that's this story anyway we really do now we've ramble too much on this as these videos tend to do this has been part one how as long will it be before we get part two hold your breath thanks for watching everybody thanks for putting up with this I hope it's been of interest to you see you next time you

Channel: David Bull

Views: 311,098

Rating: 4.9205685 out of 5

Keywords: woodblock printmaking, Japanese prints, Japanese printmaking, Genji Emaki, Yoshio Okada, Yuyudo Publishing

Id: 2L3M7isGQbg

Length: 40min 34sec (2434 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 14 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/-_-BanditGirl-_-]

A voice like this, only intentional, would be amazing. Any recommendations?