Woodcut ranks among the oldest printmaking techniques. In theory, it is a simple process: to prepare a printing block, the artist carves into the grain of a piece of wood using a chisel or gouge, a sharp metal hand tool with a concave cutting profile. The excavated portion of the block—the negative—corresponds to blank space in the finished print; what remains of the block’s original surface—the positive—is a mirror of the final result. The carved relief is then coated with ink and stamped onto paper to produce the image.
Historically speaking, the reality is more complicated: woodcut printing has almost always been a specialty technique requiring extensive training and special talent to do well. During the Renaissance, European printing workshops relied on master woodcarvers to translate an artist’s design into a block suitable for printing; not even the German polymath Albrecht Dürer is thought to have carved his own. It was a labor-intensive process that required significant capital and a complex division of artistic labor.
Woodcuts saw a resurgence at the beginn…