On The Fence
"On The Fence" is a woodcut novel. The basic theme is the ambiguous status of trying to find sanity in an insane world. Ahmadinejad is the protagonist. Through a magical transformation, he finds himself on an Israeli bus during the second intifada, a period where suicide bombings terrorized Israel. He passes through the security wall and he is swept up in protests and competing religious fervor.
A woodcut print is made by transferring a picture to a flat piece of wood and then carving away the white parts of the image, leaving the black parts on the surface. Ink is then rolled on the surface, paper is applied and then the block is either run through a printing press or rubbed with a spoon.
I use the computer to complete the process. I carve the block, print it and then scan it. The computerized image is no less compelling to me then the inked image. It is much more “flexible” in that I can manipulate it using software without changing its graphic quality. The finished product is the image in a variety of forms: an ink-jet image, a published image in printed form or an image on the web.
