Visual Language and Influences

Claire Van Vliet (1933–), founder of the Janus Press and one of the foremost printmakers and book artists of the 20th century, taught Bascove to print at the Philadelphia College of Art. She is known for her creative approaches to bookbinding and book structures, often employing inventive folding techniques and non-adhesive bindings to challenge the forms a book can take.

Van Vliet also introduced her to the world of book cover design: “I was very fortunate . . . [Claire] took me aside when she found out that I was a reader and I loved books. She said, ‘Let me show you people who do illustrated books.’ And I felt like, ‘Well, I love to read, and maybe that's a way for me to do art and support myself,’ . . . She really showed me that there could be a place for me.”[4]

Bascove printed her first book with Van Vliet’s help, on a Vandercook cylinder press—similar to the one in the Massey College Bibliography Room!

A form of relief printing, woodcuts are the oldest form of printmaking, and have been used in Europe since the early 15th century, with the earliest examples of printing with woodblocks coming from China around the 3rd century. With relief techniques, we think about the design subtractively, meaning that any part of the illustration that is not meant to be printed must be carved out of the block. The raised areas that remain after the block has been cut will retain ink.

The resulting design can then be inked and impressed onto the sheet of paper, using a printing press, or flat handheld tools.[5]

Today, you can send a file to an inkjet or laser printer, and have a colour copy of a document or photo in moments. But for several hundred years, the most effective way of including colour in printed illustrations would be to paint them by hand using tempera or watercolour paints.

While living in Paris in the late 1970s, Bascove visited an exhibition on tarot cards, which proved to be a major source of inspiration for her work on Davies’ novels. She was drawn to their visual language for the magical, enigmatic feeling they evoke, and because of the symbolism and archetypal figures that underpin how tarot are understood.[6]

The top card here is La Force (Strength), and was the main inspiration for the cover illustration for The Lyre of Orpheus.

Tarot cards originated in Italy during the early modern period (c. 1440), and were originally created using woodcuts and sometimes coloured by hand. As you’ll see, this is very similar to Bascove’s own creative process!

The work of German Expressionist artists like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner are bold, and graphic, featuring simplified forms and high-contrast colour. Kirchner was a member of the Die Brücke (“The Bridge”) art group, a collective that emerged in the early 1910s, who wanted to revive German arts and crafts such as woodblock printing, and serve as a "bridge" between historical and modern German art.[7]

The dynamic colours and evocative figures of the Die Brücke are evident in Bascove’s work. She also felt that the Expressionists’ ability to reflect personal and societal anxieties, combined with their creative approaches to woodcutting, aligned with her own artistic persuasions.[8]

Bascove’s love of book illustration was fostered in part by the images she found in classic Russian literature.9

A lover of the words as well as the images, she created a series of plays by Anton Chekhov for her college thesis, which featured her woodcut illustrations and were bound by hand. Later in her career, she created covers for works by Chekhov and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Ever drawn to images that are more complex and symbolic than they first appear, this still life by Arcimboldo, which playfully depicts a librarian[11] constructed from a pile of books, was a favourite of Bascove’s, and, she later discovered, of Davies’ too. They both had prints of the painting hanging in their workspaces.