Work in Progress or St. Joe is My Homeboy

Today is the feast of All Saints, where we Catholic folk (and perhaps other Christian religions, too -- I don't mean to be exclusive!) celebrate and honor all those who have died and made their way up to heaven. This includes the official canonized saints, and the unofficial saints, the ordinary people who made small differences in our lives that we remember. 


Growing up Catholic, I was surrounded by the saints in imagery, prayer, and books. The gave me a great deal of comfort and guidance. The notion of a patron saint for different people, places, and contexts is extremely comforting to me: St. Anthony helped us find parking spaces and lost items, St. Germaine, my patron through confirmation, reminded me of humility, St. Cecilia guided my love of music, etc, etc. 


One saint who has literally surrounded me throughout a vast majority of my life has been good old St. Joseph. He gets a lot of mention, as a part of the Holy Family, but not always a lot of credit, in my humble opinion. I mean, think about it - he had to raise and discipline Jesus. Good Lord, can you imagine? 


My tiny home parish, where my heart will forever lie, is St. Joseph's, and while I was growing up, it was made of a small number of families and many familiar faces. I made my first communion and confirmation at St. Joe's, and have many warm memories of the small church packed to the seams on Christmas Eve and Easter. The priests who resided at St. Joe's throughout my life have been wonderful men, and a couple were (and are) close family friends. 


In my adult life, I feel fortunate and grateful that St. Joe seems to be watching out for me as I begin married life. When Andy and I looked for a parish here in Vermont, we thought that St. Joseph was the closest to his then-apartment. It turns out that there is actually another small parish up the street, but we didn't find that out until much later, and became parishioners at this St. Joseph. I feel as if there is a beautiful kind of symmetry to the fact that I was married at St. Joseph's, a parish under the same patronage as the one I left back home. I believe St. Joseph is a special patron saint of my marriage -- perhaps not official honored as such, but in my mind, he's looking out for Andy and I the way he did for his own small family.


And so, on the feast of All Saints, I present to you all my tribute to the man himself, earthly Dad of Jesus -- in lino print style.




I began yesterday by printing out a pic of St. Joe that I would use as the basis for my lino cut.

I searched the print studio, and came up with a piece of tracing paper that I taped over the image, and used as a guide to determine which chunks of the picture I would remove on my lino block, appearing white on the print, and which parts would remain in the block and appear as black. This isn't as easy as it sounds -- despite the fact that it's a black and white image, there are a lot of shades of grey that don't exactly work when you're dealing with a two-toned operation like this. The final tracing appears below, along with a makeshift piece of "carbon paper" that I created by rubbing a lot of pencil on a sheet of blank paper:

Now, the challenge: transferring the pencil image onto the linoleum so I can carve along some pre-determined lines. Like I mentioned in the last post, linoleum printing involves some challenges because, well, you can't see through it like you can with other mediums used for print-making. So transfer of images is necessary. In this case, I turned the "carbon paper" upside down onto my linoleum surface:

Then, I taped my traced image on top of the upside-down carbon paper, and traced with a pen over the outlines of the areas I would remove:

Then, the reveal...

At this point, the most tedious task, the carving, is up next. I dug in last night, working from the top down, and plan to continue more tonight. Printing should occur this week!


Have a peaceful All Saints, friends!