Since wood block printing is turning into a popular thing now, we’ve also decided to investigate a bit further into that so-called art to judge, as a magazine, whether it was a legitimate art style or not.
Some of us see the wood block printing as legitimate and a neat way to make original art at record speed. However, the majority of us feel that this way of making art is not legitimate and can be easily copied and stolen, which is not at all what an artist wants.
First of all, even though an artist who so chooses to use this method can make an abundance of “prints” for a customer or commission, all of the pieces are exactly the same. The wood blocks take the originality and diversity out of the paintings. If you make two of the same paintings with a brush and paint, one is going to be different and that’s what the buyers want.
The second reason why this is not a legitimate art “style” is that it can often lack the carefulness and precision that most paintings and sculptures have. For those, it’s essential to have neat edges and precision blending for them to look nice. That’s not the case with the block prints. What we’re saying is that the prints can be sloppy sometimes, even if they look fairly nice.
Artists have been turning to block prints lately because it has been harder to fill commissions, which is understandable. The noble families can’t seem to get enough art and what’s better than mass producing pieces to sell? That way everybody that wants a painting exactly like the one they saw, they can get it, no sweat. The problem for artists doing this is that once there’s more than one of the same art cycling through the market, all of the art pieces lose value and the artist’s name loses value, not good. We try to support artists as much as possible and even though the block prints are a very convenient and fast alternative to oil paint, we still don’t support the prints as much as the actual blood sweat and tears paintings.