— SOL — is a series of Rust’s work consisting of woodblock prints and patterns derived from those prints.
The foundation for the prints is created by slowly, over the course of many hours, removing grain from a carefully selected block of Douglas fir using wire brushes. The softer spring-wood grain is removed, leaving the older summer-wood grain in place along with harder knots, etc. as the printing 'face' of the block. The physical process of stripping down the grain becomes an act of meditation for me as the work progresses and the parts you don’t need turn to dust under your tools…
The physical prints are hand-printed on washi kozo (a sustainable Japanese mulberry paper) using archival eco-friendly soy-based printing inks and additional pigments as needed. Digitally the prints are cleaned and cropped and for the 'pattern' pieces manipulated using an open-source graphics editor.