A couple of Linocuts finished a couple of days before Christmas. Now for a bit of break before starting new work. Both these are taken from sketches made some time ago. The Golden Oriole is from sketches drawn on 17th May 1998 at Lakenheath Fen in Suffolk. The Chough is a little more recent, drawn on 5th August 2014 on the Ceredigion coast between Llangrannog and Ynys Lochtyn.
All along the Calder Valley are signs of its industrial past. Some are obvious, the old mill buildings dating from the industrial revolution to older relics of the old cottage industries. Along the watercourses there are old overgrown mill leats and broken sluices the only remaining traces of industries long gone and now hidden by the overgrown tangle of reclaiming woodland.
Leading on nicely from my previous post. This newly completed linocut may come as something of a surprise to anyone familiar with my usual work. A couple of years ago I was approached about a possible commission for an illustration of Luddites. Not my usual choice of subject matter but I did some research and worked up some rough drawings. As it turned out for a variety of reasons mainly related to the fact that everything fell apart during the Covid pandemic the commission came to nothing. The rough drawings remained in my sketchbooks and I did no further work on them at the time. Something about them kept nagging in my mind though and I kept looking back at the drawings. I'd taken one of them quite a long way to being worked out as a print and leaving them at this stage felt like unfinished business. So a couple of weeks ago I took out the drawing and transferred it to a block of lino and made a small edition of just 4 prints, mainly for my own benefit with no expectation of it being particularly saleable. In a departure from my usual pastoral references this print has influences of Soviet Era propaganda posters with a little bit of DC Comics thrown in for good measure.
Come Cropper Lads of High Renown
6 Colour Reduction Linocut
300mm x 210mm
Edition of 4
detail
The title of the print comes from the first line of The Croppers Song. Allegedly written and first performed by the Luddite John Walker at a February 1812 meeting of the Liversedge and Huddersfield Croppers, held at the Shears Arms at Hightown, in Liversedge. Only a couple of miles over the hill from my home where this print was made, the Shears Arms is still open as a Public House.
Another small wood engraving 55mm x 40mm on an oddly shaped sample block. Quite a test of composition. This is the Dumb Steeple at Cooper Bridge in the Calder Valley, close to where the River Colne joins the River Calder. Originally it stood in the centre of the crossroads where the road up the valley divides, one branch crosses the Calder and on to Huddersfield, whilst the main road continues up the Calder Valley. Now though it stands to one side, having been moved from its original spot when the roads were widened. In 1812 it was the rallying point for a group of Luddites prior to them marching on Rawfolds Mill in Liversedge a couple of miles over the hill from here.
Newly completed wood engraving on Boxwood of the Pentre Ifan neolithic burial chamber in Pembrokeshire
Pentre Ifan
Wood Engraving on Boxwood
39mm x 63mm
Printed on Japanese Simili paper with Hawthorn Dense Black ink.
Images from this weekends two day mezzotint workshop held at Prospect Studios at Waterfoot in Rossendale, Lancashire, a short 50 minute drive across the moors from my home.
I started working on this mezzotint back at the end of January and in fits and starts it's been slow progress since then. This impression printed earlier this week is at the 5th State and still there is a long way to go with a lot more scraping and burnishing required to make the whites really pop out.
Usually my prints are made from recently drawn sketches and fresh ideas. Sometimes though a sketch may have laid unused for years. This latest print evolved from one such drawing. Looking at my range of subject matter it's all a bit haphazard and I thought it might be a good idea to create a body of more unified work. Something that I haven't done since a solo exhibition I held at Doncaster Art Gallery 8 years ago. With that in mind I started thinking about some of the memorable encounters that I've had over the years; Pine Marten in Scotland, Golden Eagle in the Lake District and Otters in Wales, Leighton Moss in Lancashire and also in Scotland. Thinking along these lines I realised that it was a long time since I had last seen an Otter. It's even longer since I last saw a Pine Marten but going back to the subject of Otters I turned up the drawings of the last sighting I had. Twelve years ago my wife and I happened to be in Dumfries in Southern Scotland. We had parked in a carpark beside the river and on returning noticed a large crowd of people leaning against the railings looking at something in the water. Naturally we went over to be nosey, assuming they were just watching kids playing around in the water. What we saw was an Otter fishing below the weir just underneath the footpath. Fortunately I had a small A6 notebook in my pocket and a stubby bit of pencil and managed a few scribbled sketches, more as a record of the encounter than with any expectation of them being the basis of anything further. I splashed the watercolour on later to fix the pencil and stop it smudging any further than it already had.
Looking at these sketches recently I began to think that maybe something could be made of them and I doodled up the design below in black biro.
It had possibilities so I drew a more refined design in pen and ink to the size of a spare wood block that I had.
.jpg)
After a couple of days engraving I had this
The Fisher King
Wood Engraving on Maple Wood
100mm x 75mm
I'm pleased to announce that I will be running a two day mezzotint workshop at the West Yorkshire Print Workshop in Mirfield on 20th-21st August. Full details of how to apply can be found here
When I did this sketch of Llyn Ogwen whilst on holiday a few years ago.. I had it in the back of my mind that it would make a good linocut. Over the years since I've looked at it but never been able to come up with a way to satisfactorily work it out as a block print. I came to the conclusion that atmospherically it needed to be a mezzotint but again was unsure of how to go about it. Enlightenment arrived in the form of a book on the work of the Welsh artist Kyffin Williams, which I received as a Christmas present. Looking at the work in the book, especially the ink and wash sketches gave me the inspiration for a starting point. So looking again at my initial watercolour field study I made this monochrome wash drawing.
Now I had a tonal painting that I could use as the basis for my mezzotint.
I scanned the image, reversed it and printed it out, using this to transfer it to the 200mm x 300mm copper plate.
and began the engraving.
