Cutting It Fine

The ancient art of wood engraving requires introspection and secrecy in order to create intriguing and intricate pieces of work, discovers Clive Aslet.

- Clive Aslet

If you want an antidote to the computer screen, turn to wood engraving. ‘We’ve reached 1790, with dashes of the 1920s,’ discloses one practitioner, who would rather not be named for fear of incurring the wrath of other artists. This is an art, with a strong admixture of craft, in which it routinely takes days, if not weeks or months, to produce works of unassuming dimension—so small that they’re sometimes best appreciated with the help of a magnifying glass. 

‘OCD,’ declares another exhibitor at the annual show by the Society of Wood Engravers (SWE), of the temperament required. ‘It’s ridiculous,’ admits Peter Lawrence, whose work is given pride of place as this year’s featured artist, of the amount of labour involved. ‘I like to include humour. That becomes difficult when you may be working on the same piece for 300 hours.’ 

For the collector, however, the obsessiveness of the artists yields a glorious reward. In relation to the amount of time spent in producing them, these modestly priced works —they rarely cost more than a few hundred pounds—are the steal of the century. Produced not in warehouse-sized studios, but often on kitchen tables, the works are intimate, if not always in subject, then in the mode of creation. This invites introspection, even secretiveness, and I’m told that artists â€‹are often astonished to discover what their peers have been working on and the methods involved.

For strangely, as the SWE exhibition, now touring the country, demonstrates, this ancient technique can be used to create of the-moment effects. Some works are bold, even gritty. Every day, thousands of people pass the wood engravings that David Gentleman made for London Transport in 1978, which have been enlarged to platform scale.