Prints Charming (sorry)

Lord knows I love painting but I have found an increasing affinity with print making and in particular lino prints. What I enjoy about lino prints is how brutal they can be. There’s big slabs of colour, if you’re doing monochrome prints it’s very binary, black/white and maybe some impressionistic marks for shading. So it’s a very different discipline from painting.

I decided I was going to add this string to my art practice bow and did a print course with the Cardiff Print House at the beginning of the year. Subsequently I bought some small pieces of lino to try out and refine my technique. Even though I’ve only done five prints I’ve already began to see what works and what doesn’t, I only intended the first sets of prints to be sketches but the last few have come out pretty well. So much so that I’ve submitted three to an imminent exhibition at the Hundred Years gallery where I had the solo exhibition of my paintings in February this year and also at an open exhibition in the Gate gallery in Cardiff. I’ll probably submit to the RWA open in August with my prints.

The process is quite messy, well it certainly is when I do it, but every time I go to the Print workshop  I’m not quite as bad, and I enjoy the mechanisms of producing a print even if cleaning up is a pain in the ass.

I realise that the two prints here may look a little macabre, but that's not the intention. The Mari Lwyd is a Horses skull which would get dressed up for festivals in Wales, we're a weird nation. I saw one for the first time in the Welsh Folk Museum in Saint Fagans when I was on my Foundation year and always found it a striking image and great subject matter for a print.

The print below is inspired by the Mexican 'Day of the Dead' festival, which I've always wanted to attend. Other prints focus on Buddhist iconography, which is a theme I'm going to develop.