Back to the North East

Delving back to sketches drawn on holiday last summer for this next print and a reworking in mezzotint of a subject that I have already made a linocut of.

Dunstanburgh Castle from Beadnell Harbour.
Mezzotint  - 1st State Impression 1.

A bit of tidying up to do. All the white areas need to be burnished back  and the sky around the castle needs to be blended back more subtly into the clouds.

Blackcap

An old friend of mine, a poet, often sends his letters prefaced by a wonderful Haiku. The imagery suggested in a recent one about a singing Blackcap, was the influence behind this engraving of the bird. Cut last week and printed yesterday in an edition of 30.

Blackcap

Engraving on Resingrave

127mm x 102mm

Woodcock

It's been a while since I made a linocut print so the last three days have been spent cutting and printing this little reduction print of a Woodcock in it's roding flight at dusk.

Woodcock Roding

Reduction Linocut (11 colours printed in 7 passes)

190mm x 170mm

Edition of 8

Where Seven Streams Fall

Finally finished the platework on the new mezzotint and after two days editioning the plate I now have a stack of 20 impressions dried between blotting paper.

Where Seven Streams Fall

Mezzotint

200mm x 300mm

Edition of 20

This is Lumb Falls in Crimsworth Dene, a small valley which runs down off the moor to join the Calder Valley at Hebden Bridge. About 10 miles as the crow flies up the valley from where I am writing this. The bridge in the background (a worthy subject in it's own right) carries the old Packhorse Route from Burnley to Halifax across the beck.

Just before the First World War a group of local men sat on the rocks between the two waterfalls and posed for a photograph. Many years later the poet Ted Hughes came across the photo and wrote a poem called Six Young Men, a line from the poem gave me the idea for the title. The poem can be read in full here

The print is available from my on-line shop here

Last Chance to Buy

Just before the world turned out the lights and closed the doors I collected some unsold prints from a number of galleries. Having only just got around to unpacking them I now have a couple of prints that I had thought were sold out. I have relisted them on my on line shop as below.

Into the Gathering Dusk.
Linocut
1 Available here

Song of Evening
Linocut
2 Available here