Linocut Cartoon Printmaker — Life-Size Sculpture, Arts Centre, Kraków

The centre teaches relief printing and has done since the 1960s. Their commission brief was, appropriately, written in the language of the process: they asked for a sculpture that could be read as a two-colour lino print.

Two inks, and a rule about everything else

A linocut made with two blocks has exactly two colours. Each block prints flat, so there are no gradients and no blending. Where the dark block is cut away, the lighter ink or the paper shows through, and where both blocks overlap there is one mixed tone.

The sculpture follows all of that. A warm cream ground, a deep olive middle tone, and a near-black for the lines and the deepest shadow. Three tones in total and not one of them blended into another.

Copying a cut, not a drawing

The character of a linocut is in the tool marks: short strokes of a gouge, a slightly ragged edge wherever a line ends, and occasional small areas where the ink did not take because the surface was cut too deep.

We cut the maquette’s surface with actual gouges at 260 mm before casting it, so the enlarged piece carries real tool marks. There are roughly two hundred places on the finished sculpture where a shape has been reduced to a stroked hatch instead of a solid, exactly as a printmaker would solve a mid-tone.

The registration is deliberate and slightly off. In a two-block print, the two impressions almost never line up perfectly, and the resulting sliver of cream along one edge of every dark shape is the single most recognisable thing about the medium. Ours is offset by about 5 mm, consistently, in one direction, as though the paper had shifted on the press.

In the courtyard

It stands at 2.1 m beside the drying racks, where students wait for proofs. The centre runs an exercise where a class has to identify which parts of the sculpture could not have been made with two blocks, and the answer, correctly argued, is that none of them could.