The White Line: Wood Engraving in Canada Since 1945

A.H. Mrozewski is a librarian at Laurentian University.

A welcome addition to far too few publications on wood engraving in
Canada. This is, on a somewhat more limited scale, a continuation of
Patricia Ainslies’s Images of the Land: Canadian Block Prints
1919-1945. The present volume contains a selection of wood engravings
from a larger exhibition that was held first at the Carnegie Gallery in
Dundas, Ontario, in 1990, and later circulated throughout the province.

The introduction and a chapter dealing with the characteristics of wood
engraving are written by Brender а Brandis, an excellent printmaker and
the author of Wood, Ink and Paper. Probably it is not by accident that
this book, like two other books of his wood engravings, was issued by
the Porcupine’s Quill, one of the very few publishing houses that
produces esthetically pleasing books.

Brender а Brandis gives a brief yet informative description of wood
engraving in Canada—he describes the achievements of his colleagues
and of the small presses that are dedicated to this most noble, and
pure, graphic technique. He notes the difficulties engravers sometimes
had in the past (even in obtaining the proper wood or paper!), their
isolation from other practitioners of this art, and the
neglect/ignorance of them by the public (and probably by the majority of
publishers and art critics as well). He finds deplorable “the current
fashion for buying these so-called ‘prints’,” which are nothing
but the mass-produced photomechanical reproductions.

Wood engravings are well reproduced (however, a list of them, with
dates and sizes, could be added). Of particular interest for this
reviewer are those by Nancy Ruth Jackson, Brender а Brandis, Laurence
Hyde, Guy Debenham, Bruno Bobak, and Edward Porter. Other artists whose
works are in this book are Paul Ballard, Wesley Bates, Alistair Bell,
Eric Bergman, A. Bruce Bradshaw, Louis Brien, Helene Dery, Bryce
Eriksen, Julius Griffith, Sylvia Hahn, Pauline Hooton Hall, McGregor
Hone, Barbara Howard, Alexander S. Husveti, Rosemary Kilbourn, James Ian
MacDougall, Michael Montcombroux, Craig McDonald Mooney, Michiel
Oudemans, Elieen Pence, Walter J. Phillips, Wendy Simon, James Agrell
Smith, F. Stewart W. Sprague, George Walker, and Jim Westergard. A
notable omission is Edwin Holgate.

Biographies of the artists are by Danuta Kamocki. It is surprising how
many of the artists are self-taught in the medium of wood engraving. It
is also interesting to note that a number of them came from other
countries, mainly England and the United States.