Circle Angel, Weasley Bates, 1986

There is enough woodworking activity around to create a market for The Woodcut Artist’s Handbook, a new book by George A. Walker, himself a distinguished practitioner. As the book makes clear, the form, so simple at first glance, actually lends itself to a wide variety of approaches. While Walker’s woodcuts are filled with puppetlike creatures, their menacing demeanour tempered by floppiness, Clifford, Ont. artist Wesley Bates (whose work has adorned the novels of Giovanni Boccaccio, Mark Twain and Russell Smith) creates engravings that have a knobby hardness, evocative of rural life. Naoko Matsubara, born in Japan and currently living in Oakville, Ont., takes inspiration from her native land’s rich tradition of religiously allegorical woodcuts, which she combines with the bluntness of Western art. Conversely, the Nova Scotia couple Suezan Aikins and Sam Rogers each create natural scenes of remarkable lightness, fluidity and delicacy.

In Walker’s words, the reason for the popularity of woodcuts is straightforward: “They provide tangible evidence of the human hand.” A primordial and rooted art form, pleasing to the eye in its directness and lack of guile, woodcutting proves that the future can be created by returning to the past.