What’s Black and White and Green?

         First, to celebrate “Black and White” - It’s our Blogiversary!  Fifteen years ago I started blogging, and in 1,504 posts so far I’ve shared my thoughts, theories, and enthusiasm for relief block prints and speculative fiction, and of course Words of the Month.  My audience is small, and I’m really not much of a social media type, but I’ve appreciated the opportunity to connect with the folks who have found this blog over the years.  If you’re reading this, thanks for being here with me!

        In the past few years I’ve been posting a little less frequently, and I’ll admit that sometimes I really don’t have time for this.  But even though sometimes it feels like a chore, there are other times when I still really enjoy it.  So perhaps I’ll be scaling back my posts still further - but on the other hand, who knows?  I probably wouldn’t have guessed 15 years ago that I’d still be doing this now.

        In addition to Black and White’s fifteenth birthday, another item to celebrate today is the publication of another poem.  “The Green Girl Thinks of Home” just came out in the Summer 2025 issue of New Myths, and you can read it (plus the rest of the contents) here.  I hope you enjoy my poem - but it will help if you know about the legend of the Green Children…

        The character of the Green Girl comes from a folk tale from Suffolk in the East of England.  Some time in the 12th century two mysterious, green-skinned children were found near the town of Woolpit.  The brother and sister spoke an unknown language, were dressed in unfamiliar style,  and could eat no normal food except broad beans.  The boy soon died, but the girl eventually learned English and explained that she came from a land that was always in twilight.  While watching cattle in this green, twilit land, the children entered a cave, and following the sound of church bells, at length they emerged in England.

        Of course the motif of entering another world through a cave is a very common one in folklore, but it’s interesting that this time we are the strange other world.  Folklorists have come up with various explanations and interpretations: tales of aliens ranging from faeries to indigenous Britons to Flemish settlers to extra-terrestrials… or tales of ancient harvest rituals or metaphors of death and rebirth, or perhaps garbled tales of some historical event such as a kidnapping, arsenical poisoning, or  hypochromic anemia…  According to the story, the Green Girl learned to eat other foods, was given a job as a maid, and eventually married.  I don’t know whether she had children.  A number of other writers have explored the story in various ways, but for me the interesting part is the defamiliarization of what our world would seem like to someone who had known only twilight.

        The idea for the poem and a first draft date back a long time, probably some 35 years.  But relatively recently when I started getting back into writing and submitting poetry, I came back to it and reworked it considerably.  However, the basic idea has stayed the same: everyone always says that enduring the “troughs” of experience is worth it in order to enjoy the “peaks” — but what if it’s better not to have any extremes at all?  Certainly someone from a land of perpetual twilight might think so.  What do you think?

        My illustration is a rubber block print that didn’t really turn out as I’d hoped.  I used the bad rubber and I had such a tough time with the printing that I don’t know whether I’ll even bother making an entire edition of originals for sale.  But I wanted to illustrate the poem because TEASER ALERT: I expect to include it in my next collection of stories, poems, and art, which now has the working title Beyond Pomegranate & Thorns.  Stay tuned for exciting updates in the coming months!

[Picture: “Then the Magic Happened,”cover art by Paula Hammond for New Myths Vol. 19, Issue 71, Summer 2025 (Image from NewMyths.com);

Green Girl at Twilight, rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2025.]

Pollinator Week

         It’s Pollinator Week, so let’s celebrate with block prints of some of our world’s wonderful pollinators.  I’ll start right off with a bang with this beautiful, bright image of a variety of bees and butterflies visiting a variety of flowers.  This piece by Kate Heiss took seven blocks and is full of summery color.  Butterflies are particularly beloved, being beautiful and gentle.  They are often considered symbolic of the soul and of rebirth.  How fitting, then, that their pollination helps ensure the rebirth of the plants they visit.  If you want to support butterflies, you should grow not only the flowers they pollinate, but also the plants on which they lay their eggs (such as milkweed for monarchs.)

        Another piece by Heiss, using only one block, shows a wonderful graphic quality.  This one reminds us of the incredible importance of bees for pollination.  It shows sunflowers (with wonderful patterns) in the foreground, while the background shows a cultivated field.  Scientists estimate that about a third of the food we eat (as many as three quarters of the different crop species) are dependent on pollination by bees.  So yes, you should be concerned that many species of bees are in serious decline.  Please lay off the pesticides in your yard, for the sake of bees, butterflies, and other pollinators - and for the sake of the humans who like

to eat the food they pollinate!

        Up next is a pollinator from the Americas that everyone loves: the hummingbird.  Each block of this two-block linocut by Alynn Guerra is printed with a color gradation for a fiery red palette that any hummingbird would love.  Where I live we get only one species of hummingbird, and they always seem like a wonderful gift.  Where there are many species you can see the evidence of co-evolution between the flowers and the hummingbirds’ bills.

        A less well-known pollinator is the bat, mostly the fruit-eating bats of tropical and desert areas.  (All the bats in my area are insect-eaters.)  Still, over 500 species of plants rely on bats, including bananas and mangos, so don’t underestimate their services to flowering plants.  Here’s a two-layer reduction linocut by Emīls Salmiņš, showing three bats feasting on the berries that probably wouldn’t even be there without the bats’ pollination.

        And finally, here’s one of my own rubber block prints, featuring another night-time pollinator: the moth.  A study in 2023 found that moths were actually more efficient pollinators than bees, carrying more pollen, and visiting a wider variety of species.  On the other hand, they pollinate fewer vital food crops.  A number of our beloved flowers are pollinated by moths, though, including morning glories, honeysuckle, monarda, and evening primrose.

        In addition, wasps, flies, beetles, other birds, and small mammals can also provide flowering plants with that vital pollination.  Never forget that nature is a wildly complex, interconnected, finely tuned machine, and every time we mess up part of it (like using all those pesticides on foods crops - or your lawn), we cause unintended and sometimes disastrous consequences.  Pollinator Week is a reminder that we need to protect these creatures, both the beautiful beloved ones and the less flashy ones.  And of course it’s also a good excuse for block prints.  (To see the collection of pollinators I posted way back in 2013, see that Pollinator Week post.)

[Pictures: Poppies and Pollinators, linocut by Kate Heiss (Image from VK Gallery);

Sunflower and Bees, linocut by Heiss (Image from VK Gallery);

Hummingbird, linocut print by Alynn Guerra (Image from Red Hydrant Press);

Bats, linocut reduction print by Emīls Salmiņš (Image from Two Lovers Printmaking);

Wee Hours, rubber block print by AEGNydam (Image from NydamPrints.com).]

Distant Stars

         Here’s my most recent block print, an epic one by my standards, as it's very nearly the full size of the rubber blocks that I use (18x12 inches) and therefore as big as I can ever go.  (It is cut down slightly just to make it fit well into a standard size frame.)  The process was not too unusual, and indeed the star areas with white carved into black actually go very quickly, despite all the words.  On the other hand, carving black words on a white background, as in the title, is much more difficult.  Also, I tried a few experiments with pressing instead of carving: the circles and diamonds in the border were pressed with small bits of metal tubing.  The stars were also pressed in with a couple of different sizes of phillips screwdrivers.

        Because people always ask me how long it takes to make a print, I once again tried to keep track of my time.  The end result was about 17 and a half hours, including 3 hours to draw the design, 12 and a half hours of carving, and 2 hours of printing.  I have not yet matted or framed any, which will of course take more time.  Generally I never worked for more than an hour at a time, although I might carve for a few sessions in one day.  This was spread out over many days - even longer because the block was too big to bring with me to carve during art shows last month, so there was a bit of a hiatus while I worked on smaller pieces.

        The idea for this block had been floating around in my head for some time, because I’ve always thought the constellations are so random.  I thought it would be fun and funny to make up a batch of constellations highlighting the crazy selection of pictures people could claim to see in the stars of some alien fantasy world.  I brainstormed lots of possible constellations, but the ones I ended up including are

     The Kiwi - Because I love kiwis!

     The Dirigible - Maybe a common form of transportation for these people

     The Guppy - Not all constellations are large and complex

     The Silverfish - I was trying to think of something utterly random and not usually considered to be worth the stellar treatment

     The Polypodrollery - An inside joke; this is one of the malacomorphs I invented in a little block print, for inclusion in my book On the Virtues of Beasts of the Realms of Imagination

     The Salad Fork - I was amused by the specificity: it’s not just any fork

     The Five Socks - Does this world have 5-footed people, or 6-footed people missing a sock, or bipedal people missing one sock out of 3 pairs?  Presumably there’s a myth that explains this.

     The Glekprunk - I found this creature in the Luttrell Psalter, a manuscript from 1325-1340.  Because it’s a marginal doodle, I had to make up a name for it.  (Prunk is German for “magnificence.”)

     The Starnose Mole - What more appropriate creature to be a constellation?

     The Teapot - People born under the sign of the celestial Teapot are warm and inviting, but can be quick-tempered.

     The Diploceraspis - This is (or was, anyway) one of those real creatures that seems as strange as any fantasy beast.  Perhaps in this world they’re still around.

     The Crwth - An intrinsically funny word in English

        Having decided on my constellations, I also had to figure out how to fill the corners of my star chart.  Many of the fancy renaissance star charts feature decorative scenes in the four corners, and they’re often scenes from mythology.  Obviously my distant world needed its own mythology, so I depicted Night weaving a starry blanket for her daughter the Moon.  (I also wrote a poem about this, which will no doubt be shared in due course.)  In the lower corners I put philosopher-astronomers’ towers for their observations.  These are more-or-less copied from the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493), but with the telescopes added.  The sun is also adapted from a renaissance woodcut.

        Of course, since the people who view this sky aren’t Romans with Roman mythology, they obviously wouldn’t speak Latin, let alone English, but since I wanted people in our world to be able to read the captions, I had to put them “in translation.”  Therefore I went with English for the constellation names for maximum comprehension, and Latin for the title cartouche for maximum fancy learnedness.

        All those little words aren’t ever as perfectly carved as I would like, and I didn’t notice until after I’d printed the whole batch that it’s missing the little connecting spots in the lower right corner of the border.  Despite my measuring and drawing guidelines, the border elements are pretty wonky, and I accidently carved away a border line from the left edge of the title cartouche.  I probably should have added a lot more stars, and the experiment with the phillips screwdrivers  did not make as clear an X as I had hoped.  So many imperfections!  And yet on the whole I’m pretty pleased with it.  I hope it pleases the imagination of others, too.

[Picture: Distant Stars, rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2025 (Image from NydamPrints.com.)]

They

        Despite a couple of recent posts about my own poetry activities, it’s actually been quite a while since I shared a fantasy poem.  So here’s one called simply Fantasy, by Ruth Mather Skidmore from 1933.

I think if I should wait some night in an enchanted forest
With tall dim hemlocks and moss-covered branches,
And quiet, shadowy aisles between the tall blue-lichened trees;
With low shrubs forming grotesque outlines in the moonlight,
And the ground covered with a thick carpet of pine needles
So that my footsteps made no sound, —
They would not be afraid to glide silently from their hiding places
To the white patch of moonlight on the pine needles,
And dance to the moon and the stars and the wind.

Their arms would gleam white in the moonlight
And a thousand dewdrops sparkle in the dimness of their hair;
But I should not dare to look at their wildly beautiful faces.

        This poem is a bit unusual, for a couple of reasons.  For one thing, the odd number of lines in the final stanza leaves it feeling abrupt, almost unfinished.  To be clear, this doesn’t feel like a mistake, but like pulling the rug out from under the reader to leave us feeling unbalanced.  The structure is also sneaky: starting with that conditional “if” and then walking us into the woods with those long descriptive clauses building up and building up… Until suddenly we’re confronted with the mysterious gleaming figures, beautiful but terrifying.

        There’s also a bit of a mystery about the author, who apparently never published another poem except this one, which came out in an anthology called Off to Arcady when she was a student at Vassar College.  It’s certainly easy enough to believe that a woman might be an extremely accomplished poet without ever having more than one poem published - especially after she got married and had a family to care for.  Still, you’d think that this early taste of success would have encouraged her to continue.  Ruth Mather Skidmore’s complete disappearance as a poet is almost as strange and unsettling as those dancers in the white patch of moonlight on the pine needles.

[Picture: The Fairy Dance (slightly cropped), painting by Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, 1895 (Image from Wikimedia Commons);

Thanks to Theodora Goss for posting the poem at Poems of the Fantastic and Macabre.] 

World Oceans Day

         World Oceans Day will be June 8, so here’s a selection of block prints of the ocean.  I’m starting with waves in the rain off a coast.  I love the colors in this woodcut by Henri Rivière.  This is an ocean that’s paradoxically almost soothingly rough - I wouldn’t want to be out on a fishing boat in the rain, but there’s no storm or drama.  It would be a good ocean to look at from the cozy warmth and safety of a cottage on shore, reminding us of the ocean’s enormity without being threatening.  Rivière was one of that

first generation of European artists who encountered Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints and were enormously influenced by them.  In this piece he uses about 5 blocks, I think.  (You can see some of Rivière's views of the Eiffel Tower in this post 36 More Views.)

        Next is a piece with a bit more drama as a full moon shines down on a much larger wave.  There’s no shore in sight, and this piece is meant to illustrate the oceans before the evolution of humans.  Its caption says “Originally, when the Moon was much closer to the Earth, it caused tremendous tidal waves.”  This is a sort of primordial ocean, with a sense of solitude.  The very fine engraving makes the shading in the clouds less carve-y than I usually like, but I think the portrayal of the moonlight reflecting on the water is gorgeous.

        Yet another version of rough waves uses yet another carving technique.  In this one by Merlyn Chesterman the engraved lines are very carve-y indeed, and I love the roughness of the lines building into the roughness of the waves.  This piece looks like it may use about 3 blocks, with gradations of grey in two of them.  Water and oceans are a very common theme for Chesterman, and I’ve shared one of her pieces before that demonstrates how she uses wood grain to portray water.  You can see that in my post Carving Water.

        And now let’s take a look at a couple of pieces that highlight not just the ocean but humans’ interaction with it.  This one by Molly Lemon is the positive side of the relationship.  A diver explores the wonder and beauty of the deep, perhaps studying in order to help with conservation.  The light filtering into the clear water is beautiful, and its fading calls the diver into the mystery of the depths.  (In another prior post you can see a couple of Lemon's Tiny Reduction Landscapes.)

        I have to end, however, with the warning.  Our relationship with the ocean has been careless at best and abusive at worst.  This piece by Beth Robertson mixes visual symbols to remind us that time is running out before our

oceans are completely choked by plastic and other threats.  Humans have always been fascinated by the ocean, which is our earthly world’s conjoined twin.  We are smitten with its beauty, terrified by its power, enticed by its mystery, greedy for its resources.  It has moved us to both poetry and piracy.  Let’s remember that ultimately we are utterly dependent on it for our lives, so it’s time - and long past time - to straighten out our relationship with Earth’s oceans.

[Pictures: Wave in the Rain, color woodcut by Henri Rivière, 1890 (Image from The Cleveland Museum of Art);

Tremendous Tidal Waves, illustration from The World Before the Creation of Man by Camille Flammarion, 1886 (Image from Project Gutenberg);

Rough, wood engraving by Merlyn Chesterman, 2021;

Odyssey, wood engraving by Molly Lemon, 2021;

Pandora’s Message Got Lost, wood engraving by Beth Robertson, 2021 (Last three images from The Society of Wood Engravers).]