After no less than seven months of work I’ve completed my first book. This one’s a luxury item, no doubt. 28 woodcuts, all texts and titles set by hand, all printed and bound manually – taking the edition of 24 and adding the usual spoilage that’s just a tiny bit more or less than 1000 […]
Author: Leon Friederichs
A peek into the new studio

For a month now I’ve moved into a new studio. The previous one had been a spacious room occupied by at most 18 people, and while fortunately (and not inevitably) it’s always been pleasant company, a couple of times the vibes haven’t been the ones in favour of productive work. A lot depended on how […]
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There’s a shop!

And now for but a quick announcement! Per popular request (and also my landlord’s insistence that I need to pay some rent) there’s now a shop on this site for all that stuff I’m making. Right now it’s all prints; if there’s demand for it, I shall provide some drawings as well. I don’t and won’t […]
Copy, cover, afterimage

Almost exactly one year ago I paid a visit to Amsterdam, taking the opportunity while still living a stone’s throw from the Netherlands, and just before moving to faraway Leipzig. A working trip, as usual, dedicating to checking out all the Rembrandts and Vincents. Of course I had planned to write extensive blogposts at the […]
To hell with “buttery consistency”

Sunday morning: Darn, my go-to bakeries are closed and I, breadless, have to resort to the chain around the corner. I know exactly what to expect there: Smooth, even, uniform loaves that are pretty much exactly like the one I’ve bought some weeks ago when it was fresh. The baker down the road, on the […]
Paris, the fourth

My fourth visit to Paris since this blog started with the first – and finally one from which I got a reasonable amount of drawings!
Living inside a story

Some time around 2010, give or take a year, I was on one of these family holidays with all the uncles around. Some treasure unearthed from grandpa’s eclectic bookshelf made the rounds. Someone had randomly taken the book out and after a few pages started reading a bunch of memorable passages out loud to the […]
To See or Not to See
Saturday, Greven. Standing in a concert crowd I was making faint attempts at doing a few quick sketches of the front man jumping about when a lady next to me remarked how enviable such skills … — It’s a sort of remark I dislike more and more. Nothing against flattery, I’m too vain to refuse […]
Cuts

Intaglio and relief printing are two complete opposites in my practice. I greatly admire those who manage to convey textures in a woodcut (e.g. sheets like this by Klaus Magnus: Berlin façade, 1973), but so far I fail to go very far beyond outlines. This limitation makes my relief prints the by far most conceptual […]
We are just a few
Hitchhiking to Antwerpen set a new record for how many cars I needed: Münster – Lichtendorf (near Dortmund), – Remscheid, – Aachen, – Genk, – Hasselt, – Antwerpen; six in total. In Belgium I was dropped at ramps instead of service stations, and not at very lively once, yet both times picked up within five […]