Printmaking
The history of the relief print is the history of people’s desire to communicate information, first through symbols and later through images and the printed word.
Relief Printing In a relief print it is the surface of the block that yields the image. The artist draws an image onto a suitable surface such as a wooden or linoleum block. He then cuts away all the spaces around leaving only the drawn areas raised, or in ‘relief’
Ink is applied to the surface using a roller or “brayer” and then transferred onto paper by rubbing or passing the block through a press. Since the cutaway areas do not take the ink, they appear white on the printed image. Relief prints are characterized by bold dark-light contrasts.
Albrecht Durer The Riders On the Four Horses (From the Apocalypse, c. 1496) Woodcut Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York