The Press

Paul Landacre printed his own work on a nineteenth-century press, allowing him to control the creative process from inception to finished work. In this wood engraving, Landacre portrayed his press as an aesthetic object in its own right, not simply a tool for creating art.

For Landacre, art was "more or less an emotional catharsis, and while I usually suffer during the process, I feel grand when a block is completed-that is, for a short time. So I have to do another one.... Of course as a balance, there is the physical feel of the boxwood, and the fascinating and exasperating mechanics of printing, and, as I said, the marvelous feeling of having completed something."