The Cutting Skills And Expression Of Woodblock

Woodblock is a member of the printmaking family who has the longest history but has always being renovating. The cutting skills, woodblock art's most important technique and obvious character, can be identified as the key element from where we are able to trace its evolution and development.The cutting skills can be found in relics of ancient human civilization. Born in Chinese woodblock it developed and revitalised again and again to its summit. Ever since the Renaissance, Western artists were engaged in woodblock art creation and gradually freed it from its original single function of"print-to-repeat"and trended towards an independemt plastic art that creative talents and value of appreciation were demonstrated. The upsurge of Western expressionist woodblock made cutting skills one of its most notable languages.The Chinese creative woodblock is not simply a one-way referism to the Western art. By reference and self meditation, it combines its own cultural characteristic and modeling art traditions with the Western conceptions. And by absorbing Chinese trational aesthetics and theories of painting, calligraphy , stamping and engraving, it realised multi-direction structuring and expansion in modelling language and concepts. Deepened study on cutting skills and modelling training, cutting skills and calligraphy, cutting skills and"black and white"etc are major topics of Chinese woodblock theory and areas of renovative practices.Cutting skills relate much with the type and characteristic of knives, planks, and paper etc. which are the foundations that make printing block possible to express correctly. The experience and testing on potential tools and materials has always been the most active motives in woodblock art creation.Direct sketching by using woodblock is the most reliable method to have basic training on cutting skills. In the meantime it involes deeper theories like"direct and indirect","intent and inspiration","image and exaggeration","modeling and expression"which may be an important method to temper the creator artistically.