Why Cut a Picture Into Flooring Material? Because It Cuts Like Butter

Wood has grain, which resists a tool in one direction and splits along it in another, so cutting a curve means constantly adjusting for how the material will behave, and cutting across the grain requires either great care or an end-grain block. Linoleum has no grain at all, being a homogeneous compressed material, so a tool moves equally easily in every direction and a long sweeping curve can be cut in one movement. That freedom is the whole character of the medium. Against it, the material is soft and crumbles at very fine detail, will not hold a delicate line reliably, and offers no resistance, so a slip travels a long way before stopping.

The process is the simplest of the printmaking techniques:

• •The design is drawn on the block, reversed, since the print will mirror it
• •Everything that is to stay white is cut away with gouges
• •Ink is rolled onto the remaining raised surface
• •Paper is laid on and pressure applied by press, spoon or hand
• •Further colours need further blocks, each registered to the first
• •Or one block is cut progressively and printed between each cutting

Printing several colours from a single block is a distinctive approach with a memorable consequence. The block is cut for the lightest colour and the whole edition is printed. More is then cut away and the next colour printed over the first on the same sheets. The process repeats, with the block losing material at every stage, so by the time the darkest colour is printed almost nothing remains and the block cannot be used again. The edition size must therefore be decided at the start, since no further impressions can ever be made, and a sheet spoiled at a late stage cannot be replaced. Picasso used the method extensively and it is named for the way it eliminates the block.

Cutting depends on a small set of gouges and on how they are held. A V-shaped tool cuts a narrow groove and is used for outlines and for fine lines, and its depth controls the width, since a deeper cut in a V is automatically wider. A U-shaped gouge clears broader areas and leaves a rounded channel. A very wide shallow gouge removes large open areas quickly. The block is turned rather than the hand, so a curve is cut by rotating the material into the tool, which is the single most useful technique and the one beginners neglect. Cutting away from the body matters more than in most crafts, since the material offers no resistance and a slipped tool travels fast.

The material was patented as a floor covering in 1860 and artists began cutting it around 1900, with German expressionists among the first to use it seriously. Its adoption owes a great deal to being cheap, which put printmaking within reach of people and institutions that could not afford plates, presses and acids, and it became standard in schools for exactly that reason. That cheapness produced a reputation as a beginner's material that took decades to shed, and the reputation was damaged further by its association with classroom work. Picasso's extensive use from the late 1950s did more than anything else to establish it as a serious medium, and it is now used by printmakers without apology.

Linoleum has no grain, so a tool cuts equally easily in every direction and long sweeping curves are possible in one movement, at the cost of holding fine detail badly. Cutting away what stays white, inking the raised surface and pressing paper on is the whole process. Printing several colours from one progressively cut block destroys it, so the edition size is fixed at the start. Cheapness gave it a reputation that Picasso's use dispelled.