ELIZABETH WHITE
Artist Statement

The images in this show document my life with George Krause, some of them depicting the creation of his photographs. We are a paradoxical couple, and it is paradoxical that I am younger and work in an ancient medium, whereas George, forty years older, works in the contemporary one. But our personalities sustain this paradox as well, for I am conservative, logical, careful, whereas he is whimsical, spontaneous, ever taking a step forward into completely unknown territory.

My core passion is writing, and my prints reflect this through their attention to detail and their narrative quality, the way every image implies a story. Writing and block printing are historically linked, in that the woodblock print reached its fullest flowering in the 15th and 16th centuries as a result of the newly-invented printing press. The two processes are congruous in many ways, but only recently have words demanded to be carved and speak directly through my prints.

I carve into 3/8” rubber blocks, roll ink over the incised surface, and print several trial states until I achieve a satisfactory print. Though I work out the design many times before carving, the final image is a mystery because I carve its reflection. Also, vagaries of the process determine the final print: the cuts may be looser or tighter in certain regions, affecting the character of the piece; or, my hand might slip and the design might then take a different course. Although I do a lot of planning, my favorite part of the process is when the print shows itself as something I couldn’t have dreamed of.

There is something else not quite explicable that leads to the print’s separate life, and it has to do with the image coming from a 3-d object as tangible as a wall, a stone, a hand. There is a different crispness to the lines than could be produced by a brush, the paper, as it is pressed, sometimes embosses around a cut. The vitality of a hand-pressed print is in such details, but is also in less chartable places. The spirit of the block as an object somehow passes into the paper. The print has come from something, the way the idea has come from me. I like this echoing, and the slowing down visible in this metaphor.