A World in White & Black
Ray Cronin on the work of Wesley Bates

(This article originally appeared in the Gaspereau Press 2001 Omnibus Reader)

Wesley Bates’ world has no greys, just a carefully-created illusion of that murky shade that bedevils the rest of us. His world, a world he creates “at the point of the graver,” is made up of white lines: light patiently extracted from the void.

Bates is a wood engraver, a printmaker, an artist. His engravings are done following an old process, one that restricts the size, the image and the colour range. But it is within those restrictions that Bates is able to unleash the free play of his imagination. He is also a printer, active in the arcane world of private-press printing, using antique presses and movable type, in combination with his illustrations, to create limited-edition books that are works of art in and of themselves. There is a burgeoning movement in Canada to create such works, a result perhaps of a desire to hold on to some of the long tradition of printing. These days, obsolete technologies often become cottage crafts, and then high art. Printing with movable type and woodblock engraving is one example – not coincidentally one of the figures central to the revival of this type of printing in Victorian times was the founder of the Arts and Craft Movement, William Morris.

Wesley Bates didn’t start out to be a woodblock engraver, nor the owner of a small publishing house. He started with the intention of being a painter.

Bates studied fine art at Mount Allison University. At school he majored in painting and printmaking, with a solid grounding in drawing. Bates grew up in British Columbia, but attended university in Sackville, New Brunswick. It’s a long haul from Kamloops to Sackville, and he originally investigated schools closer to home. “I had a really great art teacher named Gerry Johnson,” he said, “who took me seriously when I said that I wanted to go to art school.” Johnson provided information on several art schools, including the Vancouver School of Art, the Ontario College of Art and Mount Allison University. “I went down to the Vancouver School of Art to check it out,” he said, “but I just didn’t have a good feeling about it, I didn’t like what they were doing there.” He also wasn’t interested in oca, explaining, “the thought of going to Toronto frightened me, quite honestly.” His mother had gone to the Art Students League in New York, but Bates wanted something smaller. He was interested in Mount Allison because of its size, but also because of its strong figurative tradition. “It was also one of the few places that had more fine arts courses than academic courses,” he explained, “it was more like an art school inside a university and that appealed to me a lot.”

Alex Colville had retired a year before Bates started at Mount Allison, but he worked extensively with the painter Lawren Harris Jr. and printmaker David Silverberg. “I’m pleased that I went there because there was a strong emphasis on drawing.” Bates attended Mount Allison from 1972 until 1977, a time of great change in Canadian art schools. Figurative art was very much on the wane in Canada, with galleries and critics flocking to non-objective and conceptual work. Bates, even at Mount Allison, a conservative school for its day, felt some of that with the change in studio heads for the fine art program from Harris to Virgil Hammock.

“I think Virgil’s idea was to infect it with the twentieth century. It was interesting, but it was problematic for those of us who were interested in painting figuratively. It was a time when there was kind of a malaise in the art world, there was so much talk about process, you had to document your process. It wasn’t so much that the faculty was making those of us who wanted to paint figuratively feel like real anomalies in the art world, it was the times.”

Bates persevered to see figurative art regain its place in later years. “It seems that there is more of a balance these days,” he said.

While in school Bates worked mainly in woodcut printing, following the Japanese technique of printing with key blocks and flat colour blocks. This style of printmaking involved several different plates, carving out the images with chisels and other tools. Woodcut printing uses the cross section of wood, which means that the artist has to make allowances for the fibres of the grain. Although Bates studied painting and printmaking in equal measures at school, his graduating work was a large woodcut in the form of a triptych with eight colour registrations.

Bates met and married another artist at Mount Allison, and their daughter, Rae, was born in Sackville. “We used to bring her to class,” he said, “we’d wrap her up on the model throne when we had a figure model, there were all of these extra pillows, she’d sleep right beside the model.” After graduating the young family moved to Hamilton. There, they set about trying to survive as artists. “When I finished school I started working as a bartender,” Bates said. His artwork changed as well. “Making eight and ten colour prints, I just couldn’t manage it,” he said. “I stuck to painting at the time, doing cityscapes and people, that kind of thing.” His interest in figurative art led him to paint in Hamilton’s strip clubs, following in the footsteps of such artists as Toulouse Lautrec and Degas.

After five years in Hamilton, Bates’ life was changed by the seemingly innocuous gift of a set of gravers, tools for wood engraving. The set of small steel tools, nestled in a blue-velvet-lined black leather case, was a Christmas present from his wife, Katherine. “When I got the tools it was kind of a counterweight, or a ballast to the paintings,” he said. “I really enjoyed that it was just black and white and a really small scale.” His studies in printmaking had provided him with a certain grounding in the techniques needed for wood engraving, but it was still a very different process from what he was used to. He needed to learn how to master this new technique.

Wood engraving was developed, if not invented, by an English printer called Thomas Bewick in the late eighteenth century. Before Bewick’s time, most illustration in printing was done on metal plates, either engraved or etched. The drawback to this was that the plates were thin, necessitating a separate print run for text and images. Woodblocks could be cut to the same height as the movable type, thus permitting one run of the press and creating a significant cost saving. Wood engraving is done on the end grain of a piece of wood, which limits the size of the image but takes away the concern of wood fibres making incisions. The end grain is hard and dense, allowing for clean lines and the maximum amount of control. “Thomas Bewick was a metal engraver,” Bates explained, “so his skill was with gravers. He wanted to produce small-scale illustration but he didn’t want to fight with the fibres on the side. That’s the genius right there – he just flipped the wood over and used the end.”

Unlike the intaglio process, which involves etching metal plates and then rubbing ink into the etched lines, in wood engraving the ink only goes where the surface has been left. The lines the engraver cuts come up as white in the print. Wood engraving has captured Bates’ imagination, not least because of its unique properties. “It’s like drawing with light rather than shadow,” he said. Bates has taught the technique in workshops and regular classes at the Dundas School of Art, and getting people to understand the nature of the wood engraving line is always the trick. “It’s a positive white line,” he said, “people think it’s a negative, but it’s not.” There’s an exercise you do in drawing class that makes the process clear. The student covers an entire sheet with a thick layer of graphite, rubbing it in to make a black surface. The drawing is then done with an eraser – taking away the pencil marks to find the white beneath.

Bates began to research this new process, eventually finding a shelf in the fine arts section of McMaster University’s library devoted to wood engraving. Some of the books were about engraving, he said, but many others were on varied topics, their only note of commonality was that they featured engravings. There were novels, natural science textbooks, and even a Leica camera catalogue.

“It was really neat, they subverted the Dewey decimal system there. I would make marks on a block and then take a little proof and go look at the books to see if I could see the same kind of marks and get an idea of how they used them.”

Books, of course, feature type, and Bates began to be as interested in the typography as in the images. “Going and looking at these books I started to see these illustrations all with type, and that was my first real look at typography and how illustrations fit on a page – it caught my imagination.” Not long after, in the mid-80s, a friend told him of a printing press he had seen for sale. “I went over there and bought that and some raggedy old type, and that’s how the printing got started.”

“The printing” is a burgeoning career as an illustrator with a passion for private-press printing. He had left the bar behind at this point and was working as a designer for a corrugated cardboard company. “It wasn’t very satisfying,” he said, “it was mostly making sure that Kellogg’s was right side up on the box.” Things had to change. “So I started doing illustration work at night,” he said. “I got a break with a magazine in Toronto called The Idler, they were using up a lot of illustrations at the time and that gave me a portfolio that I could take to other people,” he explained. “Then the newspaper started giving me some work, and then I went to children’s textbooks and then into advertising.” Now, he makes his living primarily from commercial illustration work, but the percentage of his income derived from what he describes as his “own work” is steadily growing.

These days, his “own work” might be small editions of favourite poems, illustrated with his own engravings. Or perhaps bookplates for friends and family members. He also does a lot of work for other small presses, like Gaspereau Press, providing images for cover art and illustrations for books. His illustrations have appeared in books by W.O. Mitchell and Timothy Findley, for instance, and in 1994 Porcupine’s Quill published The Point of the Graver, a collection of prints and commentary by Bates.

He has several projects underway, including a collaborative project with Timothy Findley and Bill Whitehead. A few years ago, Bates provided the illustrations for their book Stone Orchard. He is currently working on a project to republish those illustrations in a limited-edition portfolio, accompanied by new text from Findley and Whitehead. He’s also working on a selection of stories from Boccaccio’s Decameron in collaboration with fellow printer Will Rueter. This year he was artist in residence at the Schneider House Museum in Kitchener, and he conducted a series of workshops at Larkspur Press in Kentucky. Last year, Henry Morris of the famous Bird and Bowl Press in Philadelphia commissioned 14 prints from Bates for a book on the nineteenth-century American naturalist, and contemporary of Audubon, Alexander Wilson. “That was a real honour,” Bates said, “I was so surprised to get that call.” It obviously worked out, as Morris commissioned a series of prints for a book on Japanese printmaking, which Bates c mpleted this summer.

Bates now lives in Clifford Ontario, and he is in the process of turning a storefront building into a studio and gallery. He has an agent who finds him commercial work, but he’s hoping that the work with private presses (his own West Meadow Press and others) will constitute even more of his income in the future. “This has grown into a deep-seated passion,” he said. “I’ve had a great opportunity to work with all kinds of writers. The wood engraving kind of opened all those doors where before I was sort of peeking through a crack."