Harvesting Rice 1937

This is Anna Heyward Taylor's woodcut, Harvesting Rice, made sometime in the early 20th century. Can you imagine making this print? It's not easy! It's additive, subtractive, a real process. I'm trying to imagine Taylor's movements as she gouged out the wood. She must have been thinking hard about form and light, figuring out how to leave only what was needed to conjure up the sensation of a group of field workers in hats bent over a rice field, the vertical lines of the rice plants contrasting with the curving lines of the women. Looking at the image, I think of other artists, like the German Expressionist woodcut artists, or even the flattened planes of someone like Manet. Artists are always in conversation with each other. They borrow ideas, switch them up. It makes you realize painting is a type of embodied expression and an ongoing exchange of ideas, across time, inspiring and challenging one another’s creativity.