Lino Print 2

Bryan Angus

Bryan is a visual artist based in Banff, north Aberdeenshire, on the Moray Firth. He is inspired by the nature around him and the rich history of the people who shaped the land. Bryan went to art college in Aberdeen in the late 70s and had an enjoyable time as a theatre designer, and then many years as an arts manager and administrator. 
In 2003 Bryan set up an art holiday and artist retreat centre giving him time to invent a new practice, starting lino printing in 2012. Since 2005 he's been exhibiting across the UK, won awards and appeared on BBC Countryfile showing his artwork. His work is in private and public collections across the world and he creates illustrations and designs for commercial projects. 

Laura Boswell

Laura is a second career artist and began linocut printing in 2005. She attended the Nagasawa Art Park residency in Japan in 2009 to learn traditional Japanese woodblock printing. The skills learnt on that and a second residency with MI Lab have shaped her printmaking and my professional career. 
Laura works exclusively with linocut and woodblock and is fascinated by ideas of shape, light and scale in the landscape. While her prints are based on observational drawings made on location, they are not direct geographic representations, rather they reflect her impression of the place. Laura prefers to leave her landscapes empty of man-made elements or people, for the viewer to enjoy on their own terms.

Gail Brodholt

Gail Brodholt is a painter and printmaker of contemporary urban landscape. Her work depicts unconsidered corners of the city and the journeys made within it. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers and has had many solo shows across the country. She works from a purpose built studio in Woolwich, south-east London, right next to the Thames Barrier. 

Zoe Cloke

Zoe Cloke is a Herne based artist and printmaker working mainly in linocut and digital giclée prints under the name of Leave Me Hanging. Her print work is inspired by snapshots of life and uses simple colour combinations often contrasted with black and white to add detail. The expansion of work to relief print making is recent and each new work explores different ways of using the medium, enjoying the noise and movement that comes from linocut compared to the clinical precision of digital work. Zoe believes strongly in making owning art accessible for all and to this end creates both unlimited and limited edition work. 

Ben Dickson

Ben Dickson is an experienced lino print and portrait artist based in Whitstable, with a history in art therapy, graphic design and commercial art. He currently works variously as a freelance artist and printmaker. Recent projects include... painting a large mural of Somerset Maugham in Whitstable. Ben also created over 500 cut outs for a social distancing project for the Marlowe Theatre and a large scale mural for Petits Supermarket in Dublin. He also produces commissioned portraits on request.

Ieuan Edwards

Ieuan is a Broadstairs-based linocut printmaker and illustrator. His maternal grandfather was a miner in South Wales and moved with his family to the Kentish coast in the late 60s when he retired from colliery life due to ill health. Although Kent born, Ieuan is acutely aware of his heritage and a large part of his work concentrates on bridging the gap between the coalfields and the seaside, chiefly through comparing the mechanical structures of our industrial heritage and those of the fairground. Ieuan’s other influences include palaeontology, exploration and folklore. 

Peter Firmin

1928 - 2018.

Peter studied at Central school of art and design 1952, specialising in wood engraving under Gertrude Hermes.

Printmaking was second nature to him. All though he is better known for his and Oliver Postgates childrens programmes as Smallfilms, The Clangers, Ivor the engine, Noggin the Nog and Bagpuss.

When he stopped making films in the 1980s he returned to his craft of engraving and lino cutting, Illustrating many books including 'The land and the garden' Vita Sackville-West. Also 'Folk tales of Britain' for the Folio society.

Kat Flint

Kat Flint is a self-taught linocut printmaker from the North East of Scotland, now living and working in South East London. With an avid online following and a distinctive graphic style, she uses bold lines and ingenious compositions to tell tales for children and adults alike. A former touring folk singer/songwriter, her interests are still firmly rooted in the storytelling tradition, exploring folklore, fairytales, symbolism, historical oddities and natural wonders - all things fascinating and fantastical, with a rich narrative seam. 

Eric Gaskell

Born in Wigan, England in 1957 Eric studied fine art at Wigan and Sunderland. After leaving art college in 1980 he won two painting scholarships as well as the Sunderland Fine Art prize. Since then Eric has continually worked in the creative industries, teaching, illustrating and exhibiting around the world. 

Drawing is key to Eric’s work and has been since college. For him it is both a diary, an academic exercise and a way to work through his ideas. His print work is colourful and structured moving from tightly figurative to symbolic/iconographic work. In print he prefers linocut, its strong, flat colour and its physical mark-making suiting his working methods and likes how its graphic appearance seems immediate but can actually take many days of work to produce.

Kate Guy

Kate Guy is a London based printmaker working with linocut and monotype. During the recent lockdowns was inspired by her cat to produce a series of prints illustrating the (non) adventures of Lockdown Cat.  Kate has always loved printmaking and created her first linocut when she was 6 on the Victorian Albion press in her parent’s studio at home.  

Kate graduated from Norwich School of Art with a degree in Graphic Design and went on to work in animation studios in London and Budapest, followed by a spell as a freelance illustrator and designer.

Kate now runs a successful textile design label ‘Kate Guy Prints’, her first designs were all linocuts based on the kitchen. She started to illustrate recipes with minimal words, just through imagery, specifically, traditional British recipes.  

Fiona Humphrey

Fiona is a Leicestershire based printmaker working predominantly with linocut to create original prints as well as linocut collages. An elected member of the Leicester Society of Artists (LSA), Fiona is also a member of the Printmakers Council. 

Fiona’s work is both semi-abstract, referencing the individual and landscape, and abstract, with compositions exploring the concepts of memory, loss, connection, and our sense of self. 

Graphic mark-making and quiet repetitive patterns sit alongside simple tonal forms in reflective compositions that are informed and inspired by the erosion of and repairs to the physical and social world about us. 

Alfred Landen

Having graduated from the University of the Arts with a first class honours degree in illustration, Alfred has exhibited at a number of shows around South London and has had his work shown at The Copeland Gallery. He has also been commissioned to design beer packaging for the Bianca Road Brewery and album cover for Mongrel Music. Alfred is also an active member of the Deptford X art collective.

Alfred’s work is often inspired by the world around him, exploring the building of nonsensical machines alongside the more commercial characters that are often directly interacting with them.

Due to this Alfred’s work really explores form, movement and exaggeration to make his works feel like they are either about to explode or deflate with pressure, giving his work a feel of anticipation and time.

Alice Macmillan

Alice Macmillan is an artist and printmaker based in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland. Specialising in linocuts, Alice’s work explores the flora and fauna of the Western Isles. Through detailed mark-making Alice aims to capture the subtle movement and tonal qualities of ‘micro-environments’ bringing the scenes to life with details such as: drops of rain, ripples in water or shimmering fish scales. Combined with the subject these details create an energy, a snapshot of a moment in nature allowing the viewer to experience the essence of an encounter with the wild.

Nick Morley

Nick Morley (also known as Linocutboy) lives and works in Margate and has been making prints for over 20 years. For the last 10 years he has specialised in linocut. Nick’s prints are inspired by nature and humankind’s attempts to understand, tame and control the natural world. 

Nick sells around the world, and he has illustrated book covers for publishers in the UK, Germany and The Netherlands. He runs Hello Print Studio in Margate, and is a Director of Resort in Margate. Nick teaches regular linocut workshops at Hello Print Studio and has run workshops in the UK, Ireland and Italy. He is the author of ‘Linocut for Artists and Designers’ which has become an indispensable resource for many linocut artists.

Helen Murgatroyd

Based in Bude, North Cornwall, Helen graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2010 with an MA in Fine Art Printmaking. In 2019 she was voted the Printmaker’s Printmaker at Printfest, in Cumbria. 

Helen makes linocuts centred round themes of food, work and rural communities. Her practise is rooted in observational drawing, in sketchbooks she documents the community she lives and works in. Helen is captivated by the challenge of translating these spontaneous, hand-drawn marks into the graphic medium of Linocut. Her images aim to capture the humility in the work and leisure activities she depicts.

Kate Neame

Kate is a Kent based designer and printmaker who takes inspiration from her architectural background and from the natural world.

Her most recent lino prints include the Coastguard Cottages at the Seven Sisters and the iconic National Trust property Scotney Castle at Lamberhurst.

Kate’s work captures the strong essential elements of the world around us, which can be seen in some of her botanical prints such as Cyclamen, White Anemone and Agapanthus and Fern Fiddleheads. Her prints are hand printed onto fully archival paper using water based ink and each print is a unique individual piece of art that form part of small limited editions.

Jo Oakley

Jo’s interest and practice in printmaking has been developed over many years as her mother is a successful printmaker and she has can’t remember a time without a printing press in her house.

This curiosity with print has bought her in the last few years to lino cutting. She has a fascination for the illustrations by Arthur Rackham and the line of Aubrey Beardsley and has collected Victorian postcards over many years.

Now living by the sea her imaginary world of sea folk has come to life.

John Pedder

John has been a builder and maker all his life with a love of woodworking, so when looking back at putting his drawing and carpentry together he says it 'just seems ridiculous to have missed it for so long.' 

Woodcut printmaking slows John down and allows him to put great industry into the simplest mark. It also offers the magic of happenstance and unpredictability which allows no end of inspiration and frustration, but mainly inspiration.

John says 'I create restriction to search for creativity. You should try it, restriction is actually very liberating.'

Mat Pringle

Mat Pringle is an Illustrator, Printmaker and Arts Educator based in Margate. He works predominantly in linocut and has a wide range of influences including folklore, film, books and music. His first solo exhibition 'An Alphabet of Musicians' featured twenty-six of his favourite musicians, singers and producers including Sun Ra, Bjork, Q-Tip, Tom Waits and PJ Harvey.

More recently he has been working from his studio at Resort creating bigger multi-layered reduction prints using the Hello Print Studio facilities. He has been teaching Illustration and Printmaking at the BRIT School for over five years and is looking to expand his teaching practice to local schools and workshops.

Amanda Ribbans

Amanda studied graphic design in London often gravitating towards the print-room where she explored lithography and screen-printing for poster design projects. After graduating she became a designer and then the senior designer at the South Bank Centre. She was responsible for designing and illustrating the publicity materials for many major cross arts festivals. Two of her posters were awarded ‘Best Poster of the Year’ by the International Society for the Promotion of Performing Arts.   

Her subjects are reactions to life experiences that have triggered a moment of happiness and often reflect her enjoyment of the natural world. She hopes that despite people not knowing the back-story, some of the emotion that motivated the image, will transfer to the viewer. Her design background has an obvious influence on her work, which is often bold and reductive; a combination of observation and imagination. 

Hugh Ribbans

Hugh Ribbans trained at Canterbury College of Art. Relief printmaking was his craft subject at college, particularly linocutting, and in 1989 he purchased a restored Columbian press, c.1860.

He produces linocuts and woodcuts sometimes mixing heavily grained wood and lino in his prints. Subject matter can be images of animals and birds or people and places seen when travelling. Always with an obsession with line and a reverence to Edward Bawden.

He has exhibited at the Barbican Gallery, the National Theatre, the National Print Exhibition, the Printmakers Council Open, The Society of Wood Engravers, the Society of Wildlife Artists, the Fry Gallery and the Affordable Artfair.

Ben Sands

Ben Sands was born in 1920 in Westcliff on Sea, Essex in 1920. At the age of 14 his artistic talent earned him a scholarship to the Willesden School of Art and after serving in the second world war, Ben enrolled at London’s Central School of Arts & Crafts to develop further skills in wood-engraving. He worked as a typographic designer in a publishing house, while working on his own creative artwork in his spare time. This led him to get his own small printing press in the 1950s. His printing projects produced a number of broadsheets and handmade printed books. Ben moved to Whitstable in 1960 with his family. He was devoted to producing lino-cut engravings in the decades after retirement. Ben died in 2016 and his son Matt has kindly donated a selection of works for this exhibition.

Sean Star Wars

Sean lives in Laurel, Mississippi in the US. He earned his MFA in Printmaking from Louisiana State University. In addition to making woodcuts for over 25 years, Sean has been an Adjunct Professor, a janitor and a used car salesman. Sean currently works fulltime as a printmaker and he makes about 12 visiting artist appearances a year at many of the nations’ leading art programs.  Sean is a proud member of the legendary Outlaw Printmakers and his work is in numerous public and private collections.

Star Wars’ work can be seen on book and album covers, magazines, television programs, films and commercials.  He is currently embarking on his most challenging project ever, a woodcut a week “FOR LIFE”.

Totalpap

TOTALPAP make three dimensional papiêrmaché wall mounted pictures, freestanding sculptures, Automata, ceramics and Limited edition linocuts printed on their1869 Albion Press.  Often they lean towards humour but try to incorporate an element of peculiarity.  

Musician Justin met Emily around 1990, who had just finished a Graphics film degree at Central St Martins.     

For some fun they had a go at making some papiêrmaché sculptures, Emily having done a bit at college and home (she is from the Firmin Dynasty, daughter of Peter Firmin) which they started selling at Camden Market. Not long after they were invited  to take over the walls of The Three Kings in Clerkenwell and continued to sell from there for many years after.  

Since then Totalpap have been involved with many exhibitions including some marvellous automata shows alongside notable makers.  

Mark Wilkinson

Mark is a self-taught printmaker and illustrator specialising in linocut. Born and raised in Darlington in the North East of England, he currently lives and works in Vancouver, British Columbia.  

Always an avid fan of the great British and Irish printmakers of the 1920s, 30s and 40s, he stumbled into printmaking almost by accident. Mark was casting about for a new direction having completed a 22 year career in the military, when a chance encounter led him to consider block printing. It was a road to Damascus moment and from that day onward he has been drawn by what he sees as timeless quality and the deceptive simplicity of line and form it allows.