The Owl Pen
The following article first appeared in North Simcoe Life Magazine, in their December 2023 Issue, on Page 30.
I did my first relief print in Grade 9 art class- back in 1994, and to be honest, I didn’t love it. I carried on with my studies and even studied Studio Art at the University of Guelph, going my whole art degree without carving another thing! I was in the Print Department all the time, but focussed on screen printing and lithography. It was a decade later before I got back to carving, when I was introduced to the book “The Owl Pen”, by Kenneth McNeill Wells, with woodcuts by Lucille Oille. The Owl Pen is set in Oro Medonte in the 1940’s, and tells tales of Wells and Oille as they fulfill their dream of building a homestead for themselves out of an old log cabin.
I became quite taken with the simple and idealized stories written by Wells, and found them quite calming. The stories are cleverly illustrated with exceptional woodcuts, with a picture or two for each chapter. I was reminded of my basic knowledge of relief printing- I had learned on linoleum, which is referred to as “lino” block printing, and while these images were carved into wood, they are created with the same principles.
Relief prints are made by first sketching an image, then carving the image into a surface (wood or lino), ink is applied to the surface and it is transferred to paper- either by rubbing the paper by hand, or sending it though a press. By using this method you can recreate an image multiple times, without technology. It requires some abstract thinking however- as you have to first imagine your image mirrored, but also be able to think about which surface will have ink and which will not- often referred to as the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ (like developing a photograph). I loved studying Oille’s images and trying to wrap my head around these concepts- Which area was carved away? Which was left? How did she create movement here? How did she depict this animal/face/snowdrift? She was very skilled.
Oille was born in Toronto in 1912, and studied at the Ontario College of Art, and later at the Royal College of Art in London, England. She worked in sculpture and printmaking, and I cannot help but imagine her work in the three dimensional work of sculpture helped inform her work as a printmaker. I began recreating her work in an effort to study her technique; feeling like an apprentice across time and space, as she passed in 1997, but her work and legacy remain. I am also fortunate to spend a lot of time in Oro Medonte, near to the original homestead. This print is a study of her work found on page 73 of “The Owl Pen”, a chapter titled “We Sit Up With Chicks”. The first line reads: “There was peace at The Owl Pen, the sort of peace that comes inevitably in the winter time, to an old log house by a singing creek, with deep snow all around.” Wishing you all a peaceful winter time.
