Halla: One Cut at a Time

“When I pulled the paper off the first print, it was like something in me just clicked.”

Galleries are constantly being replaced in the art exhibition room in the Penick Academic Complex. But every January, a full time art professor gets a spot in the highly coveted showroom space to highlight his or her particular specialization. The rotating schedule started this year off with Steve Halla’s work lining the walls of the spot-lit room off of the main PAC hallway.

I’m sitting in Halla’s office after just having toured his gallery next door. There are pictures of his daughters and wife tacked to the bulletin board on my left. One of his prints of a dilapidated house hangs on the wall to my right. And I am surrounded by books from different genres of art. Steve Halla sits back in his desk chair, his hair is a little longer than last semester when I took him for arts in Western civilization, but his charisma and presence are still unchanged.

Any student that has taken his class knows the way he says “oh my goodness” when he tells a story, or they have heard about his love for the Christian rock band, Stryper. But what most students don’t know about Halla is his proficiency in the artistic form of the woodcut.

“This year it will be twenty years. I first started in 1998, and I was taking woodcarving lessons at a place called The Carving Arts Center in Plano, Texas. I started off doing these three-dimensional carvings and I was horrible at it—completely horrible. I realized I could not grasp 3D form, and the moment when things queued in is when I was supposed to do a carving of a Native American portrait. I was supposed to carve out the material by the nose.

“So, I’m sitting there just making little tiny cuts. About an hour later the instructor who had been watching me, Carl, finally came up to me and said ‘Steve do you need some help?’ and he picks up one of my tools and in literally about ten seconds [he fixed it.] I was like ‘how did you do that?’ and as he tried to explain it to me, it was in that process that I realized I just can’t think like that.

“So, we started talking and I shared with him that I love to draw, and I love to carve. Carl asked if I had ever made a wood cut before. He walked me through the basic process, and when I pulled the paper off the first print it was like something in me just clicked. It just connects with me in a way that nothing else seems to do in terms of artistic mediums, and that was the start of it.”

As I was unfamiliar with the woodcut method, Halla explained it as a three-step process:

The first step is to create a design, which is either drawn directly onto the woodblock or transferred on later from paper. The second step is carving away everything but the image, and the third step is inking the surface and placing paper on top to retrieve your image. Halla chooses to press the image by hand by using a wooden spoon to transfer ink to paper. This is not a simple process, and Halla states that the total time spent on these projects can range from years to months depending on the image and design. The raw time to carve a woodblock is typically around twenty-four hours for Halla, and inking can take anywhere from two to three hours.

Since his art is all outside of what he does at Union, the majority of his carving is done at home, and Halla is the first to admit that due to the time-consuming nature of woodcutting, his family is the first to lose his time. But, they have been able to remedy this by finding new ways to spend time together.

“When my wife and I had our first daughter, Evelyn, we decided that we wanted the making of art to be as common to our kids as eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It should always be that normal. When the kids were small, all the carving was done at the kitchen table—at the same table where we eat, at the same table where I do my art. Some of my best memories are of us sitting at the table with me carving and the girls with piles of paper and pencils and crayons, and everybody is creating away. That process of living this art lifestyle contributes partly to why I think they are very open to me doing this, because they are also engaged in artistic things throughout the week. I have learned that I could never ever do this without the 100 percent complete support of my wife and my kids.”

Time spent away from family is a physical aspect of the intensity of his work. But the art itself reveals a more hidden perspective. Posters hang all around campus announcing Halla’s gallery. But, the face of an elderly woman that comprises the poster is a testament to the amount of time that can be exhausted by this medium, as well as the dedication of Halla to his work.

“I first attempted to make that woodcut print eight years ago and I worked out a design, carved the woodblock, and it was a total disaster. I realized I couldn’t figure out how to do the hair around her face. I took the design, rolled it up, and just thought, “well, someday I could come back to it.” I forgot about it for eight years, until last year when I was asked to do a show in Louisville. I wanted to do the image of the woman from Louisville. So, I pulled out the design, and looked at all the notes as to why I had given up and was overjoyed to find that I had since worked out a technique that could work with her hair. So, I tried it again and it worked, now it’s in the gallery.”

If you look closely at the portrait of the woman, you can see what seems to be dots. This comes from a technique that Halla found when playing with new carving methods. The approach he used involved three nails and continuous and precise tapping with a hammer to create divots and splits in the woodblock surface, which gives the impression of a “dotted” appearance. However, this style presents its own challenges. It is hard to tell just from the surface how hard or soft the woodblock is, and you don’t often find out the density of the wood until you are in the stages of carving. If you hit a soft spot in the wood, then the nail can drive too deeply. If you hit a hard spot, then the wood can split.

“I have come to a point now, where if it ruins, it ruins, and you start all over again. I have had enough of those experiences that I think it’s just part of doing it. If you’re willing to do it and you take into account that there is going to be a lot of failures, then you can do it. But there is that moment of anxiety, especially if it’s a piece you really like.”

Despite this frustration, Halla still chooses to do woodcarving over all other mediums.

“I like the idea of taking something which you could technically say was once part of a living organism and was in some way contributing to the betterment of all of us through the production of oxygen or shade, but ultimately it dies. Then suddenly I have the woodblock, and through artistry, you breathe this new life into this thing, in the sense that you carve it, you pull an image from it, and then that material still contributes in a completely different way. It’s like redeeming them in some fashion, you give it a new freshness and purpose.”

Halla says that his style and expression had influences rooted by Carl Bindhammer, his original instructor. Carl called for Halla to study German expressionists. Halla was impressed by the minimalistic structure of the German woodcarvings, and developed a love of black and white, simplicity, and the idea of using just one woodblock.

“But then Carl said, you have to know Durer, who gave me a love of detail. How much detail can you actually convey through a carved image?”

Halla pulled a book off of his shelf that contained endless prints by Gustave Baumann, Carl’s favorite artist.

“He was known for his color prints. He gave me this incredible sense of joy for working with wood, and even though I have absolutely no desire to work in color, I look at those works and I’m just amazed.”

Halla’s favorite piece was his very first print—a crude self-portrait, which is the only piece he has ever hung in his house. This piece is not in the gallery, but instead, Halla chose to feature some of his more recent work based on his photographs from Venice, as well as prints of Jesus and paintbrushes.

To learn more about these bodies of work you can attend a lecture by Steve Halla on March 1, at 4:30pm in room A-72, which will be followed by a short reception at 5:30pm in the gallery.