Carving the Sublime

Belgian artist and printmaker, Elia Vanderheyden (www.eliavanderheyden.com) creates hybrid woodcut relief prints using digital technology and traditional methods, incorporating inspiration from historical German Romantic painters to create new worlds derived from the sublime. For his print Eschaton, Vanderheyden began by combining elements from the painting The Cross in the Mountains by Caspar David Friedrich with A.I.-generated images to create hundreds of different landscapes which were hand selected and meticulously Photoshopped to create a complex composite. The final relief took over five months to complete and consisted of eight different layers; three lasercut and five cut by hand.

Vanderheyden’s concern for our climate emergency is suggested in the foreboding title and landscape is akin to a post-apocalyptic scene one might find in science fiction or a nuclear accident. However, the materiality and care he carves into the plate presses into the final print, as well as his use of colour, creates something beautiful and hints at optimism. Chrystal Cherniwchan