Studio Diary

It’s not often these days that I make a breakthrough rather than a series of small adjustments in improving my lino cut. This breakthrough is so modest, simple and, now I think about it, so embarrassingly obvious that I am pretty sure most people do it already: it’s to sand the lino before using it. Give lino a very gentle sanding with a fine paper, I use the black wet/dry 600 (dry), and printing large areas of perfectly smooth thin, thin ink becomes a doddle.

Thin, thin ink is rather important for my kind of printing: I usually go to six or seven layers of colour and because I use my dip pen drawings as my pattern to cut, there’s usually a lot of very fine detail. The gloopier the ink, the more detail goes and the messier everything gets. My friend and fine printmaker Ian Phillips mentioned the business of sanding as a throwaway comment and he’s changed my life. Well, not my life; the house still needs cleaning and there’s no masseur available on tap, but it has improved my printing no end.

The other bit of preparation I find helps is to rub a bit of colour into the lino: cutting through a colour (I usually use red) into grey is so much easier than grey on grey and somehow much more satisfactory.

The print here is inspired by a poem by Carol Ann Duffy about Red Riding Hood. The connection is loose to say the least, I’m taking part in an exhibition for World Book Day next year and this is a possible entry. As you can see it is layer on layer and registration is critical. I also use cobalt dryers to speed up the drying of my now exquisitely thin ink layers. Cobalt dryer is a pretty purple liquid which I add in tiny drops to the inks (it doesn’t affect colour at all) and instead of my waiting around for days between layers, I have only to hop from one foot to the other for a few hours before I’m printing again.

Words to the wise about this sanding business though – do try and remember to do it before you do the master drawing on the lino block. I was in peril of scraping off all my pen lines on this one…

I’ve been teaching summer school at Oxford Brookes Art School (which incidentally smells exactly like my old art school, whipping me back to a time when I lived on iced buns and lived for printing big linocuts of Aberystwyth’s distinctive architecture and town life) and one of the questions that kept coming up was ‘what paper do you use for printing your woodblocks?’.

The answer is that I haven’t settled on a paper in the UK. As I write there are rolls of paper about to be launched onto the high seas from Japan for me, but in the meantime I am using 200g Fabriano. The paper I was taught to use was washi – a long fibre mulberry bark paper – and, fatally, we were taken to the factory where the highest grade handmade washi is produced. Thanks to the usual extreme Japanese generosity I was given paper and unwittingly printed away, not realising that I was being ruined for life and that no paper I can afford in the UK would ever compare.

Fabriano 200g does work well, but I have found that it needs sizing with alum first. The alum acts as a mordant, making the colour more brilliant. I discovered a document about 17th century western paper making (I admit I was stumbling rather than engaging on personal improvement through rigorous research) which pointed out that the very same alum mordant used to prepare wool to accept dye would improve the appearance of watercolour on paper. Since I spin and occasionally dye my own wool this all made sense and, even better, I had the alum* to hand so was able to plunge into a series of experiments. My semi-scientific (I was wearing surgical gloves and a very inky lab coat) findings are that 32 – 64g of alum per 500ml water improves the colour brilliance no end.

Try it yourself. I should warn you that you shouldn’t get the stuff on your hands or in your eyes or stomach. Mind you, my mum used to lean over the kitchen sink and burn out her occasional mouth ulcers with neat alum. She swore by it, but I only ever did it once: it worked well, but felt exactly how you would expect burning a mouth ulcer out with acid would feel. Not a cheering experience.

*use Aluminium Potassium Sulphate and not Aluminium Sulphate as the latter is not as good for the paper as the former. You will find the powdered alum through any textile or wool dying suppliers.

I am currently at the mid point of my Open Studio event. I’ve been opening up my studio for the last four or five years, allowing the public to arrive at will and experience a working print room. This is the first year I have opened for every day of the fortnight and it’s a mixed blessing: on the one hand it’s great because it pins me down in the studio all day and on the other hand it’s rotten because it pins me down in the studio all day. I am suffering from cabin fever. Suddenly the thought of going to the supermarket with an optional visit to the dry cleaners seems as seductively exciting as a trip to Monaco.

On the plus side it is making me get on with my work, though in fits and starts depending on who arrives and what they want to see. I feel there’s no point in having an open studio if people can’t see work in action and talk to the artist, pick up tools, handle the prints and ask all sorts of questions. The questions are interesting and range from the highly technical (a retired engineer interested in the inside specifications of the Albion Press) to the ghoulish (small boy ‘are those tools sharp enough to cut you so it wouldn’t stop bleeding until all your blood ran out?’) and sometimes to the plain well, plain: ‘how much money does this make you?’.

On the whole I enjoy this hiatus in the solitary time I spend with Radio Four and now with Radio Four Extra. Printmaking is such a blend of craft and art: it’s a bit of theatre with plenty of opportunity for thrills and surprises, the dark tragedy of the misplaced registration and the joy of peeling back the final perfect impression. It’d be a shame to keep it to myself all year.

This is my ‘printing pinny’ with one of my landscapes sewn on the front. I came up with the idea because I’m often at shows and fairs and I want something that says who I am without slapping a big badge on my front. I’m going to be demonstrating at Art in Action this year; it’s a big festival and the print marquee (as I recall) is hot, crowded and confusing. It’s hard to see the artists from the audience sometimes; one year I asked a charming man all about woodcut tools and, after answering me at length, it turned out he was a fellow visitor (albeit a printmaker). So apron plus landscape hopefully equals working artist plus identity…

There is a bit more to it than that. I grew up with a mum who was a professional dressmaker for a while and a brilliantly good seamstress. She didn’t cut my sister or I any slack and we both learned to sew early. This developed into quilt and collage making while I was running a business and, if you look at my prints, actually forms the basis for how I see landscape: the sky is often a backing cloth for the land. So the apron is just a dip back into the past for me and was such fun to make.

I do still make the odd quilt by hand. I made this one for my new great niece Millie in Australia – something traditional from the old world for a new world baby…

‘Those who can’t do, teach’ – right? Teaching gets a bad press over here: seen as something an artist is forced to do to finance the creative process at best. At worst we’re teaching because we’ve failed to make it at any other level. So wrong in my opinion, especially after eight weeks of learning in Japan

As an artist, one of the greatest tools I have at my disposal is the opportunity to teach. How else will I get to work with such a diverse crowd of adults and children, all with ambitions, images, ideas, talents so very different from my own? The fact is that I have never taught anyone from age three up who hasn’t had something interesting to say through their work and their approach to printing. To work well I need to be teetering by the toes of my plimsolls on the wrong side of my comfort zone and it’s my students who help to get me there. Left alone, it’s me and Radio Four and no challenging ‘why’ or ‘what if’ or ‘how’ questions.

Japan is different. Teaching in Japan is seen as the art, the finished work is the by-product, and the more I teach the more I see why, though in truth I still see art as the art. With every group of students that leaves me clutching their prints and new found knowledge, the richer my work is for the exchange. I am glad that I have the knowledge to train others in the print process and to do it well: it’s for my benefit every bit as much as theirs.

‘Those that want to move forward, teach’ is the way I see it.

I’m teaching Japanese Woodblock at Oxford Brookes and at Missenden Abbey this summer. There are a few places still available, follow the links on the workshops page of my web site.

A couple of weeks ago I printed this linocut for my mother-in-law Sal. It was cut by her dad, Jim Boswell, who was a significant artist and illustrator. He was also, by all accounts, charming, funny, badly behaved and immensely engaging to know. It’s one of my great regrets that I never knew him in person, though I know him well through the many paintings and illustrations we have on our walls. I’d have liked his help and advice, which I know would have been good and, most of all, I would have liked his approval. Having Jim’s endorsement of my work would have meant a great deal.

I was lucky enough to know his wife Betty, a woman of great good humour and resource. She had the wit, during rationing, to whisk away Jim’s Communist Party protest banners (which he had painted enthusiastically scarlet) and boil them down into suitably pink nightdress material for Sal’s boarding school wardrobe.

This print is very simple, it was done for a record cover (I’m guessing folk music, probably sea shanties), and easy to print on my Albion. Linocuts are like fingerprints: no artist cuts a block in the same way and to ink up Jim’s block was to get that little bit closer to knowing him better. It’s not a great print, certainly not one of his best, but it’s another piece in the puzzle for me. It’s also made me wonder about my own blocks: will some distant relative inherit them? I pity anyone who has to work out my woodblocks which are a maze of multiple blocks on both sides of the same wood (I learned to be thrifty in Japan and will put work wherever there is space). There’s not much hope for the lino either: my blocks are mostly destroyed as I cut away with every layer of colour I print. No point worrying though; I shan’t be around to care!

Since 2009 I’ve had a 5m high and 140m long painting on exhibition in Aylesbury in the form of my street length enamel landscapes. People in Aylesbury know it well: they have no choice, they have to walk the length of my artwork to get to the train and bus station. My problem is showing everyone else. It’s impossible to squeeze even a sixth of it into one photo.

Finally we have a solution – a virtual walk along a massive composite picture of the whole thing and it is now on my web site. I won’t even pretend to understand how my husband Ben and brother-in-law Simon got the pictures taken, sorted and coded to make it happen. My technical involvement (apart from painting the thing in the first place) was to hold up a bit of white card at intervals and be photographed for colour balance. I’m also in the picture: once when I knew I was being photographed and look fairly civilised and a couple of times where I’m bored, cold and clutching a copy of the Sun that I found in a rubbish bin…

The virtual walk gives me just enough distance from reality for me to stop agitating about things I might do differently now and see the project for what it was: a brilliant risk that came good. It’s also an awful lot of happy memories of friends made, laughs had, early morning starts and late night finishes fired into each and every panel.

Do go and take a walk.

It’s always a pleasure to teach a skilled printmaker and I spent a day last week with Annette Sykes one to one in my studio while she got to grips with Japanese woodblock. We met in a hot tent at Hatfield where we were both demonstrating. Like me, she loves her lino, but, like me, she was immediately seduced by the possibilities of water based woodblock printing: no press, no size restrictions and a whole world of texture to explore.

I gave Annette a run for her money: she designed, cut and printed her image in the course of the day, but I also made her try some alternative types of timber. I don’t fancy the chances of her husband’s workshop surviving her enthusiasm for the raised grain of weathered timber. She’ll be filching wood at every opportunity just like me. I shamelessly helped myself to a chunk of unseasoned eucalyptus the size of a small child from a friend’s woodpile last week – I fancy cutting a rough monochrome landscape in wet wood – shouting that I would give them a print as the car buckled under the weight (they had some chestnut too which they foolishly let me see).

Annette did have a hitch when she got home; enthusiast that she is, she plunged straight back into printing. Having learnt from me to damp her printing paper in newspaper, she, like so many before her, fell foul of the Daily Mail. I neglected to tell her that I use old paper. My copies of the Guardian come via my family. They read it and then either I get it and it contributes to the creative arts, or their neighbour gets it and it’s dribbled on by their elderly Labrador. Point is that my old stuff doesn’t offset while Annette found unwanted coalition news on her printing paper thanks to a Daily Mail fresh off the press itself. Yet another note to add to my take home fact sheet. I can’t see it holding Annette back for long though…

Yesterday I had the pleasure of going to visit Industrial Brushware UK tucked away on a street at the back of Birmingham. I stumbled across the company during one of my frequent hunts on the web for anything approximating the print kit I was given in Japan. Brushes are and aren’t a problem: I had the sense to buy enough in Japan for myself in a wide variety of sizes, but I wasn’t planning to teach then and I certainly wasn’t planning to put together printing kits to sell.

Japanese printing brushes are things of beauty. Here I am talking about burashi which look like a mini shoe brush. They are expensive, horsehair and you can buy one sort of burashi of one size in one shop in the UK (please mail me and tell me I am wrong: it would make my day).

Then I found Industrial Brushware whose owner, Mr Palmer, seemed surprised that I should want something as undemanding as a little horsehair brush. He’s used to servicing nuclear plants and the military, making brushes that strip barnacles from boats and peas from vines, brushes that perforate bread wrapping and polish fine lenses…

At the moment I am trying to decide if I should go with fine hog bristle (untraditional, but Mr Palmer says has a better ‘shape memory’ and it does feel lovely and soft – do the Chinese have silky pigs?) or traditional horsehair. Either way when I get the brushes they will need conditioning.

Conditioning means splitting the hair: split ends make for good printing and it’s an essential step. It is best done under a powerful extractor fan. The brush must have its tip singed on hot metal and then have the singed bit rubbed very carefully on sharkskin if you are in Japan or know a keen fisherman, or on coarse sandpaper if you are British. I have done all this with one of Mr Palmer’s hog hair test brushes which now smells unsurprisingly like a wet pig that’s been standing too close to an electric fire. When it dries out I will print with it and keep you posted…

Rice paste, called nori, is an essential part of water based woodblock printmaking. In Japan nori is a pretty universal substance used in all sorts of ways from laundry starch to safe glue for infants (eating glue must be a common problem, I certainly ate glue at my kindergarten – it tasted of almonds, yum). It can be bought everywhere and is dirt cheap.

Imagine my dismay when I came home to find that here nori is a rare and expensive thing. It was like blundering into the the fifties and finding that olive oil was back in Boots in 4oz bottles. Concerned and mean, I looked for alternatives.

The traditional recipe involves a lot of soaking, grinding and pushing of reluctant gloop through muslin. About 10% made it into my nori pot and seemingly 150% splattered the kitchen. Then I found a recipe suggesting rice starch – taa daa! Five minutes on the internet and I had a kilo and a half of fine milled white rice flour (turns out I bought enough flour to keep Hokusai’s print shop in business for a year, but it was so very cheap)

The recipe follows, it’s dead easy, takes about ten minutes and you can wean a baby along with printing if you wish. It’s only rice and water so has no preservative. I’ve done the experiments and can tell you that it doesn’t freeze (turns into water and a lump of something very odd). It’ll keep for about four days at British warm for spring temperature before going watery, at five days it’s got a fur coat. In the fridge it will last a week.

Mix 20g rice flour with 100ml of cold water
Stir until smooth and milky
Bring 150ml water almost to the boil in a pan
Add the paste mix in a smooth ribbon and stir
Bring to the boil and keep stirring constantly until the mix goes translucent (about five mins)
Cool, stirring from time to time

This excellent recipe comes from ‘The Art and Craft of Woodblock Printmaking’ ISBN 951-558-085-4