Shell 1935

This is Paul Landacre’s ‘Shell,’ a wood engraving. The magic here is the process: you start with a block of wood, and carve away everything that isn’t the image. It’s totally backwards from painting, like a photographic negative. Look at the surface, at all those tiny lines, etched into the block! The texture is almost fabric-like, yet it gives this shell such a feeling of volume, of three-dimensionality. There’s a section down the bottom, right in the middle of the shell. The lines there curve in a really pronounced way, almost like a topographical map. It gives the shell this weighty, sculptural feeling, as if it could be lifted right off the page. There’s something about the graphic quality of black and white that makes me think of early photography. Maybe someone like Alfred Stieglitz could be a point of comparison, or even some of the German expressionist woodcuts. This piece proves that art is just a continuous game of telephone, an ongoing exchange of ideas across time.