JJ Lankes (1884-1960) was an incredibly talente.d American printmakes, working exclusively in wood. He sometimes employed classic woodcut relief techniques (such as we’ve seen with the Japanese printmakers as well as Richard Bosman), but was best known for a related technique called (confusingly) wood engraving. Regular woodcuts are carved on the side grain. Wood engraving is also a relief techinque, and carves wood on the end grain. This necessitates the use of different tools and is often easier to do in a “white on black” (white lines on black background) format rather than the “black on white” which is typical for regular woodcuts.
Lankes was recognized for his extraordinary talent fairly early in his career and was geting a goodly number of commissions, both fine art and commercial, including quite a few book illustrations and cover designs. Lankes read Robert Frost’s poety and found it resonated for him. He did some prints for himself, inspired by Frost’s work. Independently, Frost saw some of Lankes’ illustrations for other writers, and asked him to do illustrations for Frost’s poem The Star-Splitter. The two were delighted to discover that they were simpatico–sharing what Frost called “a coincidence in taste”. They worked together on several more projects. As an example of Lankes’ stuborn insistence on making things the way he really felt they should be, he created a “tailpiece” (final illustration) for The Starsplitter which was published with the poem. Years later, he was still not satisfied and created not one, but two more designs for the tailpiece purely for his own internal need.
To introduce Lankes’ work, I have selected a beautiful print of a building in Rochester, along with the cover and the original tailpiece of The Star-Splitter.
Rochester (1922, wood engraving)
