Why I Don’t Repeat My Last Print — A Block Printmaker’s Process

A year in the making, this new Lake Tahoe block print explores why Nevada and Lake Tahoe artist Craig Mitchell can’t repeat yesterday’s work — and why creative risk keeps art alive.

Today I’m in the studio working on the largest and most complex block print I’ve done to date — a piece I’ve been designing for a full year. The idea began with a sketch I made high above Lake Tahoe, standing in snowshoes. Chicago VII is playing while I proof the colors on press, and it feels connected somehow.

That record came during the years when Terry Kath was at his creative peak. You can hear it all over the album — especially in "I've Been Searching So Long." There’s a confidence in that recording, but not complacency. It feels alive, exploratory, reaching. Kath’s guitar doesn’t repeat what it did yesterday. It pushes forward. It risks something.

And that’s what strikes me today.

What they captured on that track — that performance, that moment in the studio — is fixed now. It exists permanently. It marks a place in time. You can press play and step back into it, but you cannot alter it. It was who they were then. Not before. Not after. Then.

The work I did yesterday is the same way.

It’s out there now. Finished. Fixed. A marker of who I was in that moment — what I understood, what I felt, what I could execute at that level of clarity. It carries my fingerprint from that specific point in time. And there’s something beautiful about that. Honest about it.

But I can’t live there.

If I try to recreate yesterday’s energy, yesterday’s solution, yesterday’s success, it becomes imitation — even if I’m imitating myself. Art dies in sameness. It stiffens. It becomes a formula.

The lesson I hear in that era of Chicago — in the years when they were fearless and stretching — is that greatness comes from moving forward, not polishing what already worked. When the band recorded early albums like Chicago Transit Authority and Chicago II, they weren’t trying to replicate a past triumph. They were following the music where it wanted to go.

That’s the work.

Yesterday’s piece is my “I’ve Been Searching So Long.” It stands. It marks its moment. I’m grateful for it.

But today is a different room. A different feeling. A different internal weather system.

So I work for today.

I listen for what’s loudest now. I follow where it leads, even if it contradicts what I did before. Especially if it contradicts what I did before. Because the only way the work stays alive is if I do.

Those songs from nearly fifty years ago still move me because they were fully present in their time. They weren’t recycling. They weren’t protecting something. They were searching.

And that’s what I have to keep doing.

Search.