Denver-based lowbrow pop surrealist Blood & Gold reverses the production process, creating digital designs first and working backwards into linocut block prints to make something no machine reproduction could replicate: evidence of human hands.
Blood & Gold builds his designs on an iPad first. Then, instead of sending them to a digital press, he translates them backwards into linocut block prints, using the digital work as a comp and the carved block as the final object. The reversal is the whole point.
“Working backwards towards handmade pieces from their digital comps flips the production process on its head,” he says. “That juxtaposition of modern digital tools and old-world printmaking techniques creates something far more human than a clean reproduction ever could.”
The inefficiencies introduced by the cutting process, the slight variations, the evidence of the blade in the surface, are not problems to be corrected. They are the goal. “Imperfection was the goal,” he says plainly.
“To ensure that every print looked and felt like an imperfect human being made it, not a near flawless machine reproduction.”
Blood & Gold considered screen printing before settling on block printing. The choice was deliberate: the character that linocut introduces, the grain of the cut, the density of the ink pull, the subtle inconsistencies from one print to the next, gave each piece exactly the handmade quality he was after. Every cut, carve and pull leaves evidence of physical involvement, and that traceability is what lifts the prints from reproduction into something else entirely.
The work itself sits within a lowbrow pop surrealism practice built on recontextualising iconic cartoon and pop culture imagery through themes of lost innocence. Blood & Gold emerged through daily digital drawings shared on social media from 2019, building an international following through paintings, prints, stickers and exhibitions. The block printing series represents both a return to physical craft and a new dimension of a practice that has always been rooted in the relationship between familiar imagery and uncomfortable truths.
Blood & Gold is a Denver-based lowbrow pop surrealist painter and printmaker. All prints are Speedball Block Printing Inks on cold-pressed watercolour paper, hand-cut to size.
Back To Basics. Linocut block prints, Speedball Block Printing Inks on cold-pressed watercolour paper, hand-cut to size. All photography: Blood & Gold.
People of Print Members
Blood & Gold is a People of Print Member. Membership gives artists, designers and printmakers access to a growing community of creatives, opportunities to be featured across POP’s platforms, and a space to share work with an engaged, print-focused audience. Find out more at peopleofprint.com.
Want to know more about our membership? Give us an email at members@peopleofprint.com.
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