Categories
Abstraction Inspiration Landscape Printmakers

Brenda Hartill

Website: http://www.brendahartill.com

Brenda Hartill collagraph course

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Inking a collagraph plate

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Carborundum

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Google images for Brenda Hartill collagraph

Brenda Hartill R E is a British painter, collage artist and printmaker. Her work explores the texture, pattern and light of the landscape, and ranges from finely drawn figurative works to bold, heavily embossed abstract images. Far the past 10 years she has been most interested in drawing abstract imagery from the landscape, rugged mountain erosion, structure of the land and the the dynamics of plant growth. She loves the strong light and shadow of Southern Europe, and remote New Zealand, where she was brought up, as well as the gentler greyness of the light in London and Sussex. Many of her early more figurative works are still available, and are well represented in the portfolio collections here. She is based in her studio near Rye in East Sussex.

Previously her main medium has been print, both etching and collagraph, and she has written a book (available on Amazon) “Collagraph and mixed media printmaking” for A and C Black, which is now in its 5th printing. She also recently produced a DVD, available direct from the studio.(see DVD section for details)

She is becoming increasingly interested in painting, creating a series of embossed watercolour paintings (see new works), as well as her mixed-media collage paintings using oil paint and encaustic wax . Her recent work includes a series of unique monoprints, in muted colours, and black and white, and there is a strong element of embossing in the latest prints. In addition the three dimensional have always interested her. The more sculptural embossed etchings and collagraphs have led to a breaking away from print on a single piece of paper to mixed media compilations – for example the “floating landscapes”.

Categories
Collagraph Inspiration Landscape Media Natural Urban

John Piper

John Piper was born in Epsom, Surrey, in 1903, the son of solicitor Charles Piper. He was educated at Epsom College and trained at the Richmond School of Art, followed by the Royal College of Art in London.[1] He turned from abstraction early in his career, concentrating on a more naturalistic but distinctive approach.

As a child, Piper lived in Epsom, at that time in the countryside. He went exploring on his bike, and drew and painted pictures of old churches and monuments on the way. He started making guide books complete with pictures and information at a young age. He studied at Epsom College. He did not like the college but found refuge in the art school. When he left Epsom College, Piper wanted to go to art school, to study to become an artist. However, his father disagreed and wanted him to be a solicitor. They agreed that John Piper would work for his father in London for three years, and then could pursue whatever career he chose. He failed the law exams and his father died soon after, leaving him free to become an artist. His work often focused on the British landscape, especially churches.

Piper was appointed an official war artist in World War II from 1940–1942.[1] The morning after the air raid that destroyed Coventry Cathedral, Piper produced his first painting of bomb damage, Interior of Coventry Cathedral now exhibited at the Herbert Art Gallery. Jeffery Daniels in The Times described the painting of the ruins as “all the more poignant for the exclusion of a human element”. It has been described as “Britain’s Guernica”.[2]

Piper collaborated with many others, including the poets John Betjeman and Geoffrey Grigson (on the Shell Guides[3][4]), and with potter Geoffrey Eastop and artist Ben Nicholson. In later years he produced many limited-edition prints.

Sir Osbert Sitwell invited Piper to Renishaw Hall to paint the house and illustrate an autobiography he was writing and Piper made his first of many visits to the estate in 1942. The family retain 70 of his pictures and there is a display at the hall.[5]

From 1950 Piper worked in stained glass in partnership with Patrick Reyntiens, whom he had met through John Betjeman.[6] They designed the stained-glass windows for the new Coventry Cathedral, and later for the Chapel of Robinson College, Cambridge. Washington National Cathedral prominently features his large window, “The Land Is Bright”. He designed windows for many smaller churches and created tapestries for Chichester Cathedral and Hereford Cathedral. He was a set designer for the theatre, including the Kenton Theatre in Henley and Llandaff Cathedral in Cardiff. He designed many of the premiere productions of Benjamin Britten’s operas at Glyndebourne Festival Opera, the Royal Opera House, La Fenice and the Aldeburgh Festival, as well as for some of the operas of Alun Hoddinott. In 2012 a major exhibition ‘John Piper and the Church’ examined his relationship with the Church and his contribution to the development of modern art within churches.[7] Piper wrote extensively on modern art in books and articles.[8][9][10][11] With his wife, Myfanwy Piper, he founded the contemporary art journal, Axis.

On 28 June 1992 John Piper died at his home at Fawley Bottom, Buckinghamshire, where he had lived for most of his life. His children are painters Edward Piper (deceased) and Sebastian Piper, and his grandchildren include painter Luke Piper and sculptor Henry Piper.

His auction record, £325,250, was set at Sotheby’s on 15 July 2008 for “Forms on Dark Blue”, a 3′ by 4′ oil painting made in 1936.[12]

Categories
Inspiration Landscape Linocut Media Natural Printmakers

Lynda Burke

Inspiration

Lynda Burke’s linocuts are mainly monochrome black and white. She has a strong sense of composition and design – using dramatic perspectives, grills and grids. With variety of markmaking and texturing in eg the skies. Some have hand-coloured splashes of red.

website

linocuts      landscapes  interiors and still life

Her work

Verduno, Italy   I like the vertical repetitions at the bottom here – is this a graveyard?

View from Long Wall Suffolk

Crazy Paving  I like the design of this from a simple subject.

Clissold Park  Interesting view through wire fence

Colombe d’Or, Vence this has an effective splash of red.

Terrace 1 Vence again I really like the bold composition of this with the railings of the terrace.

Tree in Woods

Bosham  here the marks for the mackerel sky I find effective together with the long format and rather bleak landscape.

Biography

Lynda Burke was born in London in 1950 and has lived and worked there most of her life, in recent years sharing her time between Camden and Vence in the south of France.

After a two-year Fine Arts Foundation Course at East Ham Technical College in London she studied Painting at Winchester School of Art – DipAD / BA(Hons) –  for three years under the guidance of established artists including Patrick Heron, graduating in 1972.

Throughout the 1970s, Lynda continued painting and print-making as well as raising a family. She regularly sold work privately and in solo exhibitions during the 1980s and 1990s, including commissions from The Distillers Company (now Diageo) and others. Her work is in private collections in England, France, United States, Japan, Singapore, Finland, Sweden, Switzerland and Italy.

Since the year 2000, Lynda has been an official guide at the original Tate Britain and the celebrated Tate Modern in London, leading regular tours around the vast galleries and bringing modern art to life for thousands of international visitors.

Since 2006 Lynda has been making art mainly in Vence, where she has also resumed an earlier interest in the medium of linocut prints, some of which can be seen on this site. As well as her Tate Modern tours in London she has also started a series of lectures on the famous artists of the Côte d’Azur.

Source: her website

Categories
Abstract Inspiration Landscape Natural Printmakers

Sue Lowe

Google images

website: http://www.somersetprintmakers.co.uk/Sue_Lowe.html

Sue’s work draws on the landscape of west Somerset. Her imagery sits on the borderline between landscape and abstract. The work is concerned with textures and surfaces and draws inspiration from the lines and patterns found in the landscape that tell stories of formation, growth, erosion and decay. Sue has developed a range of collagraph techniques that allow her to use found organic and recycled materials to create richly-textured prints. She also makes extensive use of chine colle.

Many of her images are layered in horizontal strips and represent the seasons and landscape elements. They have a unity of colour and delicacy that I like.

Sue received a fine art degree in 2004 from the University for the Creative Arts at Farnham. Since graduating she has combined development of a printmaking practice with teaching in adult education and a career in arts administration. Sue exhibited regularly in galleries and art fairs in London and the South East before moving to Somerset, (where she was born and grew up), in Spring 2011.

Categories
Design Inspiration

Patrick Caulfield

Patrick Caulfield (1936–2005)

Patrick Caulfield images

Nick Serota & Dexter Dalwood on Patrick Caulfield

TateShots: Mavis Cheek & Antonio Carluccio on Patrick Caulfield

Patrick Caulfield and Gary Hume at Tate Britain

English painter and printmaker. From the 1960s, Caulfield has been known for his iconic and vibrant paintings of modern life that reinvigorated traditional artistic genres such as the still life.

Patrick Caulfield was born in west London. He began his studies in 1956 at Chelsea School of Art, London, continuing at the Royal College of Art (1960–63), one year below the students identified as originators of Pop art. Patrick Caulfield came to prominence in the mid-1960s after studying at the Royal College of Art where fellow students included David Hockney. From the 1960s his paintings are characterised by flat areas of colour with objects defined by simple outlines.

Through his participation in the defining The New Generation exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1964, he became associated with Pop Art. However he resisted this label throughout his career, instead preferring to see himself as a ‘formal artist’ and an inheritor of painting traditions from Modern Masters such as Georges Braque, Juan Gris and Fernand Léger who influenced his composition and choice of subject matter.

In the early 1960s Caulfield’s painting was characterised by flat images of objects paired with angular geometric devices or isolated against unmodulated areas of colour. He adopted the anonymous technique of the sign painter, dispensing with visible brushwork and distracting detail and simplifying the representation of objects to a basic black outline in order to present ordinary images as emblems of a mysterious reality. He deliberately chose subjects that seemed hackneyed or ambiguous in time: not only traditional genres but selfconsciously exotic and romantic themes and views of ruins and the Mediterranean.

See for example:

In the 1970s he began to combine different artistic styles including trompe l’oeil to create highly complex paintings that play with definitions of reality and artifice. This coincided with a subtle shift in subject matter to topics that directly engaged with the contemporary social landscape and the representation of modern life. Such approaches remained his practice for the rest of his career.

See for example:

  •  After Lunch 1975 (Tate) features a photorealist image of the Château de Chillon hanging in a restaurant interior that is depicted in simple black outlines against a flat, two-toned background.
  • Tandoori Restaurant 1971 (WAVE Wolverhampton Art Gallery)

Gradually Caulfield’s attention shifted to the architectural elements to which he had earlier made isolated reference. Caulfield began to insert highly detailed passages in the manner of Photorealism into his characteristically stylised idiom, playing to great effect with ambiguous definitions of reality and artifice. Always a slow and exacting worker, he sustained a high level of pictorial invention. During the 1980s he again turned to a more stripped-down aesthetic, particularly in large paintings in which the precise disposition of only a few identifiable elements miraculously transforms an ostensibly abstract picture through the creation of a vivid sense of place.

See for example:
Later works include: The exhibition will also include later paintings such as  and the artist’s final work Braque Curtain 2005 (Tate).
See for example:

Major exhibitions during his lifetime included retrospectives at Walker Art Gallery Liverpool and Tate (both 1981), Serpentine (1992–3) and Hayward Gallery (1999). In 1993 he was elected a Royal Academician.

 

Categories
Inspiration Linocut Media Memory Printmakers

Sybil Andrews

Sybil Andrews (19 April 1898 – 21 December 1992) was an English printmaker best known for her modernist linocuts portraying the energy and excitement of urban life. Together with her  informal partner Cyril Power she helped in the establishment and became the first secretary (1925–1928) of the The Grosvenor School of Modern Art.

Her linocuts are a key source of inspiration for my linocuts in Project 5.1: Grand Arcade

List of works

For more see: Google images

References:

Clifford S Ackley ed British Prints from the Machine Age: Rhythms of Modern Life 1914-1947 Thames and Hudson 2008

Wikipedia