The Technique of the Color Wood-Cut by Walter J. Phillips

Old-school secrets of Japanese artistry from a Canadian master

Color woodcuts has been around for almost two thousand years, but the art from is generally considered to have reached its apex of technical development with the work of Japanese artists beginning in the 17th century. In the late 19th century, European, American, and Canadian artists began to study the Japanese methods of printmaking and bring their techniques to the Western art world. Among these Western practitioners, one of the true masters of the color woodcut was Canadian artist Walter J. Phillips, a printmaker, painter, teacher, and author active in Western Canada from 1915 through the 1940s.

All woodcuts involve carving a design into a block of wood, which is then used to print ink onto paper. Multiple blocks are employed for multiple colors. What sets the classic Japanese style apart from typical woodcuts is the use of semitransparent watercolor inks, applied with brush in a painterly fashion and printed on wet paper. This method allows for very subtle and beautiful color effects, but it is a very exacting process requiring much technical skill and presenting many opportunities for error. Phillips was renowned for his craftsmanship and his sublime renderings of the Canadian landscape. As an expert on the subject and an arts educator, Phillips wrote The Technique of the Color Wood-Cut, published in 1926, to extol the virtues of this challenging art form and impart its secrets to aspiring printmakers.

If you have no prior experience with color woodcuts and you want to learn how to make them, this would not be the best instructional manual to consult. For one thing, it’s very brief. For another, Phillips expects some prior knowledge of the process from his readers. He repeatedly refers to recent books on the subject like Frank Morley Fletcher’s Wood Block Printing (1916) and Allen W. Seaby’s Color Printing with Linoleum and Wood Blocks (1925) as if he assumes the reader has already read them. Rather than attempting to write a comprehensive manual of the color woodcut, what Phillips provides in this book is essentially his personal techniques and variations on the textbook process outlined in the guides of Fletcher and Seaby. Because this was written almost a century ago, Phillips does everything from scratch: mixing his own inks, planing his own boards, sizing his own paper. It is hard to say how useful such information is now that most artists just by their wood, inks, and papers ready-made from a printmaking supplier like McClain’s. On the other hand, there probably are some diehard purists of the Japanese woodcut art form that choose to do all that work the old-school way, but likely very few. Nowadays the primary audience for this book is simply fans of Phillips’s art who are curious about how he created his beautiful prints.

The book is illustrated with a few color reproductions of prints by Phillips and other artists (Seaby, William Giles, Yoshijiro Urushibara, and others). There is also the usual demonstration of color separations showing the multiple blocks that go into making a print. In addition, Phillips has created a few black and white instructional illustrations of cutting tools, brushes, and such but nothing absolutely essential for anyone attempting a woodcut. The main attraction here is the text in which Phillips outlines his process, and there’s only about 36 pages of it. Nevertheless, Phillips is a good writer, and fans of his will enjoy reading what he has to say about art. Those fans would be better off, however, reading Phillips in Print: The Selected Writings of Walter J. Phillips on Canadian Nature and Art, edited by Maria Tippett and Douglas L. Cole, which can be found online with a Google search and downloaded for free in pdf format.

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Instructional illustrations by Phillips

Color frontispiece by Phillips

Phillips in Print: The Selected Writings of Walter J. Phillips on Canadian Nature and Art, edited by Maria Tippett and Douglas L. Cole

A staunch advocate for representational art

Walter J. Phillips (1884-1963) was one of Canada’s greatest printmakers. He was also a very accomplished watercolor painter, but he is more widely known for his color woodcuts made using traditional Japanese methods. Born in England, Phillips emigrated to Canada in his late twenties. He lived and worked in Winnipeg for almost three decades, than moved West to take up a position at the Banff School of Fine Art in Alberta. In addition to being an artist and teacher, Phillips also wrote extensively on art and artists. Cultural historians Douglas L. Cole and Maria Tippett have collected a number of Phillips’s essays in the book Phillips in Print: The Selected Writings of Walter J. Phillips on Canadian Nature and Art, published in 1982 by the Manitoba Record Society in Winnipeg. Many of the selections included in the book were previously published as newspaper columns in the Winnipeg Tribune, while others were taken from unpublished manuscripts left among Phillips’s surviving papers held by a private collector. A pdf file of Phillips in Print can be found online with a Google search and downloaded for free.

Of the pdf edition’s roughly 200 pages, about two dozen are devoted to reproductions of Phillips prints, some in color and some in black and white. You can find better reproductions in other books and websites, however, so the real attraction here is Phillips’s writings, many of which have not been published elsewhere. The brief essays are not presented chronologically but arranged thematically into chapters on the practice and business of art, the four seasons of landscape sketching in Canada, favorite scenic sketching grounds, Canadian art (in Toronto), Western Canadian art, and the art of the woodcut. Cole and Tippett also open the publication with a biography of Phillips that is more extensive than one typically finds in coffee-table books of his art.

In Canada, everything west of Ontario is considered The West, at least as far as art is concerned. Phillips was proud to be a Western Canadian artist and was active in trumpeting the accomplishments of his artistic colleagues west of Toronto. At this time, however, if you wanted to find fame and fortune as an artist in Canada you had to live and work in Toronto. Phillips acknowledges that settling in the West was not a great career move, but rather than resign himself to second-class status he chose to promote Western art and lay the foundation for future geographic equity by pioneering the establishment of art scenes in Winnipeg, Banff, and Vancouver.

Phillips was personally acquainted with many of Canada’s most renowned artists, including the great Tom Thomson. Phillips’s relationship with the Group of Seven, the superstars of Canadian painting, is somewhat contentious. When he writes about them as individuals, he expresses much respect and admiration for their work. As a movement, however, Phillips takes umbrage with the implication that the Group of Seven style is the only true Canadian art. Their rough, impressionistic technique, saturated colors, and geometric mountains were too modernist for him. For Phillips, the purpose of art is to interpret the beauty of nature. In these essays he champions representational art and frequently chastises modernism as a “cult of sheer ugliness.” To those who appreciate Phillips’s realistic landscapes and classical craftsmanship, this probably won’t come as a surprise. His tastes in art are not unilaterally one-sided, however, and his insightful writings shed light on the entire varied panorama of Canadian art in the early 20th century. Though the reader may not agree with all of Phillips’s assertions about art, anyone interested in printmaking, landscape painting, or Canadian art history will enjoy his articulate discourse on these subjects.
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Walter J. Phillips by Nancy E. Green, Kate Rutherford, and Toni Tomlinson

Canadian master of the Japanese woodcut

Canadian artist Walter J. Phillips was a master of the color woodcut. Using methods and techniques developed by 18th and 19th century Japanese masters of the art form, Phillips created prints that rivaled the beauty and technical mastery of the medium’s greatest craftsmen. Phillips was born in England, but in his late twenties he moved to Canada, where he lived and worked as an artist and teacher in Winnipeg, Banff, and Victoria. He created images of the Western Canadian landscape in a colorful and lyrical style influenced by European art nouveau. The book Walter J. Phillips, published in 2013 by Pomegranate, reproduces 67 of Phillips’s prints and paintings, accompanied by quotes from the artist and three brief biographical essays.

The book is written by Nancy E. Green, a curator of art at Cornell University; Toni Tomlinson, Phillips’s granddaughter; and Kate Rutherford, Phillips’s great-granddaughter. Green provides a biographical overview of the artist’s life, training, and career that delivers sufficient interesting detail to leave the reader wanting to learn more. Rutherford tackles the question of why her great-grandfather didn’t achieve greater fame during his lifetime. The short answer is that his art was too traditionally pretty in an age when the Group of Seven were formulating a Canadian avant garde style. Phillips didn’t seem to mind, however, and was content with creating well-crafted images of natural beauty. Tomlinson’s brief essay, “Reflections of My Grandfather,” reveals an insider’s glimpse into the personality of the man behind the art.

Phillips was an artist of many talents. The images reproduced include a half dozen of his wood engravings and eight of his watercolor paintings. The rest of the illustrations are the Japanese-style color woodcuts for which he is best known. All artworks are reproduced in full color, except for the black and white wood engravings. Phillips was also an art educator, and the book’s layout pairs images of his prints with paragraphs quoted from his published and unpublished writings on art. Like most art books published these days, the book is printed on bright white matte-coated paper, resulting in a clear, crisp, high-resolution finish. While the quality of printing is excellent, the subtle and hazy coloration of Phillips’s woodcuts looks a bit washed out on the bright white paper. An off-white sheet, perhaps uncoated, would have given a closer approximation to the softness of water-based inks printed on Japanese paper. Nevertheless, it’s a beautiful book filled with beautiful art.

The most comprehensive book on Phillips’s art is Walter J. Phillips: The Complete Graphic Works, published in 1981, but that was a limited edition publication, now out of print, and a used copy will cost you a few thousand dollars. Fortunately, the author of that book, Roger Boulet, has created a website at sharecom.ca/phillips where one can view all of Phillips’s prints online. The images are low resolution, however, so the experience isn’t as pleasurable as holding a high resolution printed copy in your hands, as this book allows you to do. Green, Rutherford, and Tomlinson’s book may not be as comprehensive as a catalog raisonné, but an affordable and informative book of Phillips’s art was sorely needed, and this one fits the bill admirably. Anyone who appreciates the art of the color woodcut will enjoy it.
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Color woodcuts by Walter J. Phillips

Mount Rundle, 1951

York Boat on Lake Winnipeg, 1930

Norman Bay, 1923

Indian Days—Banff, 1950

Images of the Land: Canadian Block Prints, 1919–1945 by Patricia Ainslie

A thoroughly detailed history, gorgeously illustrated
Images of the Land is a catalog of fine art prints that was published in 1984 in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta. A second edition of the book was published in 1985. Author Patricia Ainslie provides an excellent, authoritative overview of the art form of relief printmaking in Canada during the years between the World Wars. The book is packed with stunning and beautifully reproduced images of woodcuts, linocuts, and wood engravings from this important, transformative period in Canadian art.

When comparing the 20th-century art histories of Canada and America, one thing that sets the former apart from the latter is a greater respect for the landscape as subject matter. Most of the works in this book are landscapes, though there are many examples of figurative work as well. Another characteristic of Canadian art from this period is an emphasis on representational style over abstraction. The vast majority of the works reproduced in this book are executed in the style of traditional realism, many with a hint of art nouveau, but a few of the prints show the burgeoning influence of European modernism, particularly cubism and expressionism. Unlike in America, where New York City dominated the art world, the Canadian artistic scene was divided between several isolated urban centers which developed in parallel and interacted on a somewhat limited basis. Though Toronto, as the population center of the nation, staked its claim early on as the fine art center of Canada, it received plenty of competition from Montreal, Vancouver, and Winnipeg. The text of the book is divided into geographic sections by province, for the most part moving from east to west. Ainslie gives an overview of the development of block printing in each region, and provides brief biographies of every artist represented. To read the book from beginning to end can be a bit dry, like reading a stack of resumés, but Ainslie has certainly done meticulous research, and the book is an excellent reference on its subject.

Among the key players in block printing in Canada were members of the famous group of early modernist landscape painters The Group of Seven. Edwin Holgate, Franklin Carmichael, A.J. Casson, and Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald were all active in printmaking, and J.E.H. MacDonald produced a few prints as well. His son Thoreau MacDonald went on to work extensively in wood engraving and became sort of Canada’s answer to Rockwell Kent. Toronto’s Laurence Hyde, another excellent wood engraver, would eventually go on to produce a beautiful novel in woodcuts, Southern Cross. In Montreal, Cecil Tremayne Buller created startlingly powerful, modernist figurative works. Winnipeg was home to Walter J. Phillips, a master of the Japanese-style color woodcut, while in Saskatoon, Ernest Lindner produced exquisitely intricate black-and-white wood engravings of the lush Canadian forests. This sampling only scratches the surface of the dozens of artists included, who range from the renowned to the obscure.

There are only eight color plates, but most of the works were originally created in black and white anyway. In addition to the large images scattered throughout the book, this catalog has the added bonus of an appendix featuring small black-and-white images of all 179 prints in the exhibition. This makes Images of the Land an invaluable resource for printmakers. As a block printer myself, I continually refer to this book for examples of how to represent various natural textures like water, mountains, trees, or sky. Unfortunately, this book went out of print long ago, and copies are hard to find. However, if you practice the art of block printing or just love woodcut prints, it is worth seeking out a used copy and paying a significant sum for it. It will soon become a treasured book in your collection, as it is in mine.

Walter J. Phillips, York Boat on Lake Winnipeg, 1930, color woodcut, 26.1 x 35.2 cm

Eric Bergman, Still Life, 1931, wood engraving, 16.6 x 14.2 cm

Edwin Headley Holgate, Totem Poles, 1926, woodcut, 15.0 x 12.3 cm

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