I am entranced when I have the privilege of access to a Vandercook printing press, such as those at many regional centers for books arts, under the wing of the Library of Congress' Center for Book Arts. What finally led me to this was probably the experience thirty years earlier, carving linoleum blocks for printmaking in a high school art class.
Now, though it's been years since I set type by hand, I'm still very keen on woodblock printing. (This is what I've been doing again lately.) If you live long enough (to make as many mistakes as I have), you begin to discover parallels in everything (the glorious benefit of living this long), and I thought I'd pass along an observation from George A. Walker, the author of an eminent introduction to woodcut artistry.
I think you can get away with a lot of drawing and color-match failures in art, including portraiture, but I'm familiar with very few successful artists who can get away with omitting what Walker is talking about here -- contrast. Whether it's white paper and black ink, or warm and cool temperatures in hue, or soft and hard edges, or gradations in value in an appropriate range, I have come to believe that contrast is the coin of the realm when it comes to paying your way in art.
Again, this is written to woodcut artists, but it's broadly instructive:
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A central principle I always teach my students is the value of opposites. Heraclitus said two thousand years ago that art is shaped by the tensions that exist between opposites. "Harmony," he says, "needs low and high, as progeny needs man and woman." This manifests itself in myriad ways: simplicity and complexity, drama and comedy, tradition and innovation, real and perceived, large and small, concave and convex, controlled and accidental, deliberate and spontaneous, to list a few. But of this interplay of opposites, none is more immediate than the contrast of dark line on light surface or light line on dark surface. Without the contrast, you see nothing. Simple as that.
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