Carving lesson
On learning linocut from my daughter
“This isn’t one of those boring art classes,” my ten-year-old daughter says, carving a thin pink ribbon from her block without looking up at me. “Not the kind where we don’t have art parties. Should I make a chart, and when you do good, I give you a star, and when there are enough stars, we do something fun like drink sparkling water while we do linocut?”
“How about I get a star when I take a creative risk?” I say. This is what her art teacher at school encouraged her to do: take “creative risks.” And if teaching your mom how to carve linocut1 isn’t a creative risk, what is? She’s set the table with two spots—one for her and one for me—complete with carving tools, pink blocks, printmaking paper, rollers, ink, and plastic cups for catching the curls and scraps we’ll carve out of the blocks. She’s drawn up a lesson plan and put on music.
She’s ready to teach me.
Last fall, a good friend of ours taught her the basics of linocut,2 showing her first how to carve a Pink Pearl eraser. “You want to keep your fingers out of the way,” my daughter tells me. “It’s not too bad when you cut yourself—it’s like a really bad papercut.” She’s echoing our friend’s words, as well as her own experience, since she just cut herself for the first time last week. When it happened she looked up at me, startled, squeezing her bleeding finger tight.
“I bet that happens all the time,” I said as I wrapped a paper towel around it. “I bet linocut artists have little scars all over their fingers, don’t you think? You going to let it stop you?”
“No,” she said then. And now, during the lesson, she echoes that: “It happens,” she says. “You’ll get cut. And you’ll get lots of little scars on your fingers—lots of linocut artists have them.”
I have no idea if this is actually true. It was something I said in the moment, but now that she says it back to me it takes on a certain authority.
Still, I keep my fingers out of the way as I carve. We’re doing lots of little strokes, working on shading, and I am smitten with the medium already. I dig the tool into the soft pink block and let it run along the curved line I’ve drawn, leaving behind a neat seam that will be white when we ink our prints.
My daughter appears at my shoulder, examining my work. “If I could give you some feedback,” she says, “you should do some more lines right here. Otherwise it will just be black, and that’s not what you want right now.” She says it sweetly, like she wants me to understand. Like she’s rooting for me.
And she’s right—that’s not what I want. I carve a few small lines where she’s shown me, and the pink peels out in little bits like sprinkles.
This daughter—this sweet, ten-year-old girl of mine—is our third child of four, a joyful, exuberant personality sandwiched between three other sisters, and I imagine it’s hard sometimes being right in the middle like that, with everyone rounding her up or down depending on which sister she’s with.
So this afternoon at the table is a delightful pause—an opportunity to enter into something she enjoys, even though the house around us is busy with sisters writing papers on Thomas Aquinas and practicing piano and carrying the cat around in a cardboard box. I ignore my phone (which is harder than I want to admit) and table my thoughts about dinner (though they are insistent) and bow my head over the drawing she’s given me to carve—just shapes, nothing too advanced. We’re practicing techniques today.
“After all,” she says, “you’re still a beginner.”
She’s a teacher, this girl of mine. In the same way she used to come home from school, make a desk for her younger sister near our dry-erase board, and proceed to teach her everything she’d learned that day (complete with recess breaks and silent reading time), she’s now sitting me down at the table and walking me through everything she’s learned over the last few months.
And it is very pleasant, learning from my daughter like this. As a mother, I am called to teach my daughters many things, and yet I am also acutely aware that my own knowledge is limited—there are many things I don’t know how to teach them or that it hasn’t occurred to me to teach them.
That last realization often presents itself abruptly, like a brick wall dropped across my path.
I wish I could say that, in those moments when I feel my own finitude sharply, I’m quick to guide my daughters to our God and Father and say, “Let’s go ask him.” That’s not always what I do, though—sometimes I keep butting my head against the brick wall, hoping my persistence will fix things. Or I ignore the problem, downplaying it. Or I allow other, cheaper things to distract me from it.
But this afternoon, my daughter has invited me into a moment where I’m not expected to fix things I can’t fix, or to know things I’m not meant to know. Instead, I’m allowed to settle into that finitude and thank God for the beauty of his multi-faceted people,3 of whom my daughter is one. It is good to be reminded that none of us are meant to bring everything, yet each of us—my daughter, too—brings something essential, something of value.
Sitting here at the table with her, I settle into that knowledge with a sort of relief. I am not all in all, and she is excellent company.
“Do you know how to do this?” she asks, demonstrating the way she flicks her wrist just a little as she shades her carving.
“No,” I say. “Show me.”
That particular good friend was Hannah Berry, art teacher extraordinaire! And a few months after that my daughter also had the chance to pull prints with Ned Bustard, which was just about the coolest thing to happen to her in 2023.
Romans 12:3–8.