High printing
The woodcuts, wood-engravings and linocuts of Walter Battiss
24 May – 14 June 2014
Please join us for a walkabout of the exhibition on Saturday 14 June at 11:00
A book on Walter Battiss’s high printing is available from the gallery
GALLERY AOP presents a unique collection of wood and lino blocks as well as drawings and prints, aiming to show the process from sketch to matrix, and from matrix to print. A book especially written about this collection of works will be launched at the opening. Collectively, these works constitute the high or relief printing practice of Walter Battiss.
As with other manual processes of fine art printmaking, high printing is about mirror imaging. An image is usually drawn directly (or transferred by means of tracing paper), onto a matrix, or substrate, usually a wooden block or a piece of linoleum. This image is then “cut out”, or, conversely, parts of the background are “cut away”, so that certain parts of the image stand out higher, or are raised above the others. These are then inked up by means of a roller and printed “positively”, i.e. the ink is transferred from these higher parts onto the paper.
When Murray Schoonraad completed his Master’s dissertation on Battiss’s printing techniques in 1974, he maintained that virtually forty percent of the documented work of Battiss at that stage (just over one thousand), was made up of prints. Of these roughly 400 prints, more than 200 are one or other form of high printing. (The others are mainly his well known, highly colourful screen prints and a handful of etchings.) A collection of extant wood and wood engraving blocks, linoleum blocks, metal cuts, as well as some prints were recently discovered in the Battiss estate. Many, but not all of the prints, could subsequently be matched to the blocks from which they were pulled, and these ‘matches’, or pairs, form the basis of the current exhibition.
Battiss included many of his relief prints to illustrate his numerous books, the most comprehensive arguably, Fragments of Africa (1951). What is significant about this book is the fact that the examples of high printing are offered as real prints, not reproductions. It subsequently contains nine woodcuts and seven linocuts, among other images.
