Background: Janine Schroedter is an artist participating in the 5th Annual Eastside Arts Festival, which takes place across Vancouver’s Eastside Arts District from July 18-27. This year’s festival includes art-making workshops, guided walking tours, co-presentations, and a free outdoor event at MacLean Park. Janine will be hosting a linocut print workshop at Superflux Beer Company on July 21 & 23.
Interviewer: Elke Porter
Elke Porter: Tell me a little bit about yourself.
Janine Schroedter: Sure. I am an artist in Vancouver. I’m a printmaker, painter, and I do ceramics. I teach a lot right now, maybe more than I should. I run a lot of courses and I also have a small nonprofit art studio that I run. So I help make low-income space available for artists in Vancouver, as well.
Elke Porter: That’s really nice. What first drew you to linocut printmaking, and how’s your style evolved over the years?
Janine Schroedter: I ended up doing a degree at the University of Victoria, and in the last semester of my last year, we had a teacher come in for summer studies. It was a printmaking program, and a whole bunch of us registered, and we all loved it. There was silk screening, intaglio, linocut, wood block cut, and all related things. It was really a lot of fun, and something just clicked for me. I was like, this is amazing, because usually when I was painting or drawing, you do one picture, and that’s it. And then you have this one painting, one drawing, and you sell it, or you give it away, and it’s gone forever. And suddenly, with printmaking, I could make multiples of it, and I felt the preciousness really wasn’t there as much, and I didn’t feel so like I can’t give this up. I felt much more willing to sell my work and to give my work away, even to friends, or to donate it. So that really opened a lot of doors for me with the freedom of making. I also liked that it would keep a lot of the qualities of whether silkscreen, like the hand drawn, and for linocut, just you know that nice carving texture. It goes through quite a process, so it goes from the drawing to the carving to the print, it can change and have its own little language that appears, and I really like the look of it. I liked it so much that I just kept on it. And I was like, Yeah, Lino and silkscreen are definitely the things I’m doing a lot now.
Elke Porter: Well, that’s fun. And for those of us with not as much experience, what exactly is linocut printmaking?
Janine Schroedter: Lino is under the umbrella of printmaking, I like to say, and there’s a lot of categories that live under that umbrella, but they’re not always necessarily related in direct ways. So Lino is called a relief print, so relief in the sense that you’re carving things away, and whatever’s left exposed would get inked up and would print the image. One of the harder things for a lot of people to do if they try Lino themselves is, everything gets mirrored. So when you do your drawing, and then it’s on the block and you’re carving it, it’s actually going to flip the opposite way. So for some people they get a really good system, and they reference their drawings a lot for me. I go back and forth a lot. I used to draw right on the block, and it would be like a happy surprise like, Oh, how’s that turn out? But now I do plan it a little bit more, but I do still like the surprises when I’m just like, Oh, yeah, and now it’s on the other side. It’s a fun art to do. But I think that’s the one part that everyone gets hung up on is the relief flipping and the image changing a little.
Elke Porter: Yeah, that sounds like it would be a little challenging at first. And so what do your participants walk away with? How big is this linocut usually? Is it small? Is it big?
Janine Schroedter: For any of the classes, it’s usually pretty small. So we usually like a post-it note size, like a 3 inch by 3 inch size-ish. I love to start off people if they’re learning Lino, just with a really simple project. We just do like a letter. So we pick a letter, the alphabet, and then I have a whole thing listing like capital letters, lowercase letters, which ones will flip because some of them, if you get a capital A, it doesn’t flip. But then, if you do use like A, B or C, it’s going to flip. So we talk a bit about it, just so people are prepared when they’re carving on the block. It’s not going to look right, and then when you print it, it’ll look the right way. But I use a lot of softer Lino. So they end up actually just transferring it. So they think in the positive they carve in the negative, and then it prints in the positive, so they don’t have to think too much about the flip, just while you’re carving. But yeah, it’s usually a nice letter stamp, and we talk about adding texture and mark making, and how the different marks kind of work, the tools that are used for it. So people end up leaving with like a nice little block that they could use forever keep printing with if they wanted to, and then, hopefully enough, handouts and materials that if they go into it later on, they have something to use to reference to? Kind of well, yeah, what did she say about this? And how do I carve that? And the depth of the carving and all that. You gotta practice a bit.
Elke Porter: Like, if they want to do their second letter, if they want to do their initials, or something.
Janine Schroedter: Yeah. Or if they want to do something else, like, I think in the nineties, there was somebody going around telling people they could make like their wedding invitations. Some people like Don’t do that because weddings are stressful, and that’s already like just thinking about carving this out like it feels like a really intense activity that feels simple but is not because then we talk a lot about the printing process, because that itself can also be a deterrent for some people, because when you print it doesn’t always ink well, it doesn’t always print, even sometimes the ink smushes. So there’s a lot of opportunities for mistakes and interesting things to happen. But that’s the joy of printmaking, you know. We take something so simple like drawing, and we just make it really complicated. Put a lot of extra steps into it. Make it so that there’s a lot you have to take consideration for.
Elke Porter: Yeah, that sounds complicated. Okay, you often use urban wildlife in your work. How do things like nature ecology or Vancouver’s changing environment influence this particular workshop or any other workshop you do?
Janine Schroedter: I love nature. I’m always influenced by it. I feel like when there’s something either interesting or unique that kind of gets me really excited. Then I’m driven to work on those kinds of projects. I want people to kind of think about things that they enjoy. Obviously, this is going to be a little print, so it’s got to be pretty simple. So I’ll have a lot of examples of little wildlife they can do, but usually just having something right in the middle of the print and having a little bit of background around it. There’s going to be an opportunity to have things move apart because it’s going to be more like a jigsaw puzzle for this workshop. So that’ll give people the ability to do multiple colors without having to need multiple blocks. So that’s kind of a nice opportunity. But yeah, maybe they’ll do some crows. Crows are always really popular, even in the East Side culture crawl in general, people get really excited about crows, but we have some squirrels, or different other songbirds. I like incorporating birds in as much as I can, so I always try and sneak in a couple little birds, but I think there’s a lot of local wildlife. I know I work out in Burnaby, too, and the bears are coming down from the mountains. So there might be some people enjoying making a bear or 2. But yeah, we’re gonna have some opportunity to look at some references, but then also they can bring some of their own ideas, too.
Elke Porter: What do you enjoy most about teaching workshops, especially in public venues, like Superflux?
Janine Schroedter: I like engaging with people in a place where it feels really comfortable for them. That’s always nice. I teach at community centers as well, too, but I think sometimes just having one of those uncommon atmospheres can kind of spark people. Oh, yeah, I guess I could do this here. It makes people kind of think a little bit differently about it. With Lino, it’s super mobile, like you could do this on a park bench. You could do it in your home and have it all over your kitchen table. It’s really easy to move around. You don’t have to have a big setup for it. So that’s the nicest thing about it, too, is you could… The only thing people might wonder is, if you have all these little blades you’re running around with all these little knives. They might think that’s a little suspicious. But you could potentially do it anywhere. So it has that nice flexibility with it.
Elke Porter: Have you noticed any interesting shifts in how people engage with hands-on art making in recent years, post-pandemic, or with the rise of digital tools?
Janine Schroedter: Definitely. I think there’s many sides to that. I feel like there’s people who are reborn into the arts like giving themselves that opportunity to enjoy practice play. I think it’s so great. I feel like, maybe the pandemic was like a little bit of a reset for people to think like what’s important and what do I enjoy? And just really leading into those things I teach at community centers. I do a lot of ceramics, and ceramics has always been popular, but it’s amazing how much more popular it is because people are just giving themselves that opportunity to try. I get a lot of emails as well from people asking about Lino classes and one-on-one workshops. So I think there’s a lot more requests and there’s a lot more people thinking, you know, maybe I could. I always felt before there was a feeling with adults sometimes you only get into stuff when you’re really good at it. You don’t want to waste people’s time. I don’t know if this is a psychology they think about, but I think about it a lot like, why aren’t they coming? What are they thinking? It almost feels like they have to have a basis already, like they already have to have a base understanding of something before they go into it so they don’t want to come in totally blind, which is, it’s good to know. But you can go into anything like you could learn stitching, or pottery, or painting, or Lino. You could just go to a class, especially if it’s for beginners. That’s who’s supposed to be coming and learn all the things. You don’t have to be hesitant. You don’t have to be nervous or afraid, and I think some of that’s been peeled away, but I’m sure there’s still a few people that are a little afraid to commit to maybe longer sessions. I feel like people are getting a lot more relaxed about trying art and giving themselves the opportunity and space to try and practice and do more things, especially like with family. There’s more families that are doing it, kids and adults, which is nice to see.
Elke Porter: That is nice to see. Can you tell us a memorable moment from a past East Side arts festival or culture crawl that has stuck with you?
Janine Schroedter: So many. I my artwork’s a lot about birds, and more recently I had some people come by and I did a big silkscreen about Arctic turns, and they were naturalists that had been going up and around the BC coast, and they told me all about these colonies of birds that they’d visited up the coast, and I was just mesmerized, and I’m like writing notes like, what was this island, and what was this place called? I think it’s so great when I hear people really connect to stuff and tell me their stories about it. I know when I first started the culture call so many years ago, I used to make little ceramic mushrooms and stuff because they’re just like a fun little pinchy project to do when I was waiting for classes to stop and start. People would tell me all about like their foraging trips to go collect mushrooms, and I love it, but I’m too scared because I don’t know what I’m going to eat if I pick something in the wild. I like trust the grocery stores, trust the other pickers. They know. I’m not getting strange. But yeah, I feel like people really engage with a lot of the work, and they get to tell me their own either interpretation of it or their stories. We did a plant stamp on it, and they were making plants. So I got to learn about what people’s favorite plants were. Lots of those pothos kind of cute little, and then some succulent cactuses. It was kind of fun to see what’s popular, what people are enjoying.
Elke Porter: So if someone is brand new to Linocut, or even to art, what advice or encouragement would you offer to help them get the most out of their experience and trying?
Janine Schroedter: Simplify your image as much as possible, like, try and have something really graphic, black and white. It’s a really easy way to get into it. Sometimes I tell people to look at like ink drawing, or illustrations, because that can be a good way to kind of see, like there’s no grays. It’s just solid color blocks. It’s a good way to kind of edit down the details. Start with the softer speedball linocut stuff. It’s going to be easier to carve. It’s more forgiving when you’re new. You don’t have to really dig into it. Make sure you have sharp blades. New stuff’s always good. Don’t fret about sharpening them. Just get a new set, and you’re good for quite a while. But yeah, those are the big ones for sure, and then from there it’s going to come down to your design, you know. Just make sure it’s not too detailed if it’s a smaller block.
Elke Porter: Oh, we’re already at the last question. This has gone so fast. Finally, if someone would like to connect with you after the workshop or view more of your work. How can they reach you or follow your art journey?
Janine Schroedter: I’m on Instagram at J.9 Schroeder, and I have my website, Janine schroeder.com. I list on my website a couple of classes and sometimes places I teach. And then I do have actually a teaching Instagram which is teacher underscore. J.9. And that’s where I post a lot of stuff from my students, because I like to keep them a little bit separate, but I like to kind of celebrate the stuff they do. So whether it’s kids classes, or adults classes, just kind of the work everybody’s doing.
Elke Porter: And I forgot to ask at the beginning. Tell me a little bit about your grandfather.
Janine Schroedter: My grandfather is Ernest Schroeder, and he was born in like Bad, Segeberg. It’s 50 km north of Hamburg. He used to tell me great stories like he loved nature, and he had all those Ducks Unlimited stickers on his cars. He had all these German like, I’m an energy saver German stickers all over his apartment and stuff. So yeah, I have great memories of him talking about nature and wildlife, and we co-shared a little lovebird or no. It was a finch. So I really wanted this little finch, and then I was young, and then my grandpa’s like I’ll take it so. We co-parented this little finch, and I remember hear him a lot, and we named him Marshmallow, because he looked like a little toasty marshmallow.
Elke Porter: It’s very cute. And did your grandfathers try to speak German to you?
Janine Schroedter: He did a little bit, and I’d try. And I’d be like, Uh, yeah. And he’s like, Okay. He tried a bit, and I think I wasn’t super interested when I was a kid. But then later, I tried to learn, and then by that time it was like, no, you’re on your own. Okay. But I find that he used to use words. And when I took German class I’d be like, Oh, yeah, I know this word and this word, and they’re like those aren’t words. I realized that it was either like they called it like Plattdeutsch, or they’d say, like it was um colloquial terms like switch words together and make up meetings, and I’m like no. All this German reference I have. It’s not real.
Elke Porter: Yeah, that’s so funny. Well, it was very lovely meeting you. Good luck with the culture crawl and alignment key and your students and everything. Have a great weekend!
Janine Schroedter: Thank you. Have a good weekend, bye!
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