III

an almost white substance in itself, namely rice flour – but

paper of this kind cannot be had for any price now;

on such paper it goes without saying, that one

should only use transparent effects, incidentally the

Japanese use of gold dust, silver dust and mother-of-pearl dust,

shows that they also have a proclivity for more tactile (thick)

effects than what the transparent method might

offer them. The woodcuts I have seen

by modern artists often have the appearance of being

watercolours rather than “prints” – and it is presumably a mistake,

when an art form is too similar to another – a

lithograph must be a lithograph, – so that it can-

not be mistaken for something else, – an etching must

be as far as possible an etching – nothing like a pen

drawing – and it must least of all resemble a charcoal

drawing or a lithograph – something you presumably

can achieve by using coarse sandpaper and by

placing a granular paper in between the ^{<the asphalt membrane>} wax membrane and the needle.

A coloured etching should be something else altogether, but

it is understandable, that a coloured etching and a coloured

woodcut might resemble each other, since

there are certain technical similarities in their execution, nevertheless

a coloured woodcut should not resemble anything

else – neither a coloured etching nor

(in the opposite direction) painting, – least of all in my

opinion should it resemble a watercolour – and it will

easily do so, when one employs transparent effects;

when the Japanese avoided this peril, it was due

to their strong sense of style, which forbade all naturalism

and which concentrated the atmosphere in a pure colour essence

of colour

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