Gyotaku

The walls of my office are hung with prints, mostly black and white. When I look up from my work I see woodcuts and wood engravings, lino cuts, copper and steel engravings, an etching, a lithograph, a silk screen print.

I like the way these images are shaped by the process of making them. To my right is a little wood engraving by Lionel Lindsay: a bowl of fruit, with a banana drawn with hundreds of tiny pecks and cuts of the graver. Above it is a Rex Addison lino cut: a little bunch, in which one stroke of the gouge is a whole banana. Each is just right for its medium, and every one is delicious.

But I did not know, until today, that something was missing here: Gyotaku, a Japanese method of printing directly from the bodies of fish. (Gyotaku = gyo [fish] + taku [impression]). I found this odd practice on the website of Ray Bliss Rich. Then I did a Google search for gyotaku and got more than three thousand hits.