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All of the visual arts are built around basic principles. While sculpture may focus on three-dimensionality and form, photography on composition and light and textiles on surface and texture, it might be said that colour is at the very heart of all painting, so inextricably linked to the art form that the two cannot be separated.

Throughout history, colour in painting has carried great weight and significance.

Individual colours have come to symbolise various states: emotion, virtue or vice, that are now engrained in our culture; white - purity, red – passion and yellow hope. Colours can also indicate nationality, wealth, historical period or status. With every country and culture the meaning, technique and reception may alter and yet the importance of colour does not diminish.

However, contemporary artists’ creation of colour has differed a great deal from its origins as many as 100,000 years ago. As Victoria Finlay points out in her book, Colour, we no longer have to ‘…grind a rock, or powder a root, or burn a twig, or crush a dried insect’ to create the desired pigment. This may be to the relief of many a painter who is now able to concentrate solely on the creation of their work but for others it has distanced them from their chosen media. Royal Watercolour Society Member David Brayne may be put into the latter category:

Modern science has extended the range of colours open to us but manufacturers tend to offer only those products which are most commercially viable. Many painters find these insufficient for their needs. Francis Bacon added dust from his studio floor to his paint and Miguel Barcelo, a Spanish painter living in Paris, burns car tyres to create a black transparent pigment. I have dug deep down in my garden in search of the famous Somerset iron oxide; my local equivalent of raw Siena. I particularly enjoy using iron oxides. They appear dull in their dry, powdery state but as soon I mix them with gum arabic solution or with an acrylic medium they come alive. As I gently rub them with a soft cloth onto the surface of the paper they become clear, bright, transparent oranges, reds and bluey blacks. They are lightfast and mix easily with other pigments or with tube paints; the most beautiful of colours and dirt cheap.

Spring Exhibition

John Newberry’s practice has taken him all over the globe, from the warmer climes of Malta and Sri Lanka to the mountains of the Swiss Alps and the fjords of Norway. These environments all have their own distinctive light qualities and varying ranges of colour, and Newberry seeks to represent these unique tones as honestly as his paint will allow:

Take a fresh poinsettia. Try to give the colour in the painting the same brilliance as the scarlet bracts.

Ask the questions – is the red a redder red then the green is green? In other words, which colour is the more intense?

One method is to surround it with its complimentary, to emphasise the greens and the turquoises as contrast. This is the accepted practice.

But another is to call it a ‘red picture’, to make everything reddish, the whites become pink, the blacks a purple red, green so un-colourful as to be almost black. I decided on the second by experiment years ago – try it.’

Bridget Moore’s dream-like works rely on colour to convey a sense of memory and evoke the atmosphere of a time gone by. The rich hues coupled with the themes of fantasy, theatre, circus and fairgrounds create an aesthetic experience which enables the viewer to delve into another time. A variety of yellows can often be seen in Moore’s gouache paintings; mustard, sand, mango and fleshy beige feature regularly giving the works an almost sepia tonality, reinforcing the themes of memory and childhood. She says of her use of colour:

I find colour magical. Beautiful sublime colour is mouth-watering. When young I was preoccupied with getting colours to work together, creating a balance. I still want to achieve an overall harmony, but I’m more experimental, juxtaposing colour against colour to create intimate scenes to draw the viewer in, with colour dictating the mood and feeling in my work. I build my paintings by layering colours, small amounts placed to lift, or peppering a larger area to change the energy of it, to warm or cool, quieten or zing,

enhance or camouflage depending on the amount and intensity. I enjoy colour combinations that I pick up on, out and about, on TV, other people’s colours that I envy and wonder could I make that work – invariably I can’t and have to stick with what comes intuitively or by happy accident and capitalise on that.

Ann Wegmuller RWS, The Bay, gouache & charcoal

Much like the Scottish Colourists before her, Ann Wegmuller takes her colour inspiration from nature. Born in the coastal town of Gourock, west Scotland, much of Wegmuller’s life has been spent by the sea and it is in this land- and seascape that she finds constant motivation.

I have often been asked about my use of colour and the easy answer to this is that colour is mood. This is basically true but it is also a physical reality and is often seen in the traditional landscapes of summer and winter. All these things are of course an influence but my personal use of colour represents how I feel about a place or situation. The pictorial reality of it is of no interest but rather the shapes and colours that are there.

John Newberry RWS, Poinsettia, watercolour

I saturate the paper in red or yellow paint and then work on the surface. This sets the scene in my mind and allows me to compose the subject matter. I build my painting up by drawing in colour. A cool lemon yellow into red or orange or a cool or warm blue on an ochre ground allows me to describe my subject. This painting ‘Shore Song’ (see cover image) is about the seaside which was my adventure playground as a child, rocks, rock pools, marine plants and of course sticks of rock and candy floss.

The darker colours are often a reflection on the history of a place. They do not necessarily represent a dark mood. I find it quite interesting to work in dark colours and the remains of the black houses I saw on Lewis in the Outer Hebrides lent themselves to this.

The RWS Spring Exhibition, Made in Colour, will be open 11am – 6pm daily from 24 March – 23 April.

Hatty Davidson Bridget Moore RWS, The Checked Robe, gouache

Wendy Jacob paints almost exclusively in gouache, an opaque form of the traditionally translucent watercolour. Her work explores the everyday and the domestic, bringing a graphic vitality to the most ordinary scenes. Wendy is Featured Artist in the RWS Spring Exhibition: Made in Colour.

Early artistic education has the habit of deeply affecting an artist and in this, Wendy is no different: I always loved drawing as a child – at home and at school. Fortunately, my seriously academic secondary school also had very a good Art Department where Peggy Angus, a close friend of Ravilious, was in charge. I went on to Hammersmith School of Art where Ruskin Spear taught an evening life painting class, and Bernard Cohen ran the Basic Design course based on the Paul Klee teachings at the Bauhaus.

These early introductions to figures of such great artistic influence were profound and Wendy continued her education at Hammersmith, going on to complete a course in Mural Design – a multi-media course which included stained glass, painting in both tempera and oil, mosaics and even some plastic moulding. One can see the particular influence of stained glass and mosaic in Wendy’s current practice where defined shapes are brought together using strong flat colour and line to create a scene where decorative qualities are favoured over realism. However, she says that it was the drawing skills that she acquired during these years which she would go on to rely on most heavily.

After graduating in 1963, Wendy entered the world of work and was approached by a friend who was looking for an artist to produce a hundred small drawings for a design company catalogue – Goods and Chattels. The fee was a pound for each drawing (they had approached David Gentleman, who was very well known then, as now, who had asked for much more). This led to a similar commission from Habitat, so gradually a portfolio was created and Wendy was able to find an agent who provided her with regular illustration work for magazines, newspapers and publishers.

WENDY JACOB RWS /// INTERVIEW

After a number of years in the industries of illustration and publication, Wendy began to feel drawn towards a less obviously commercial form of working: Rupert Murdoch’s revolution in Fleet Street changed the commissioning structure for this work. It was no longer such an attractive prospect, so painting began to take precedence.

Wendy Jacob RWS, Six Stacked Pots on a Shoebox, gouache

After the relatively confined nature of illustrative work, Wendy was keen to explore the world around her and work in the landscape: Often I would even take the finished work back to the subject, finding that I needed more specific information in terms of tone, pattern and structure. On my painting outings, I came across some wonderfully wayward leaning fences and I realised I had stumbled across a subject that I would return to again and again. Now I search them out and go on fence hunting expeditions.

When Wendy began painting full time, elements of her working lifestyle as a freelance illustrator were transferred to her professional painting practice; the input of a deadline was key to her routine and in order to maintain a structure she entered as many open competitions as possible including the Sunday Times Competition, New English Art Club, RWS, RI and The Discerning Eye. She says of that period: My attitude was that acceptance was great but rejection did not depress me. I used it as a learning process: it made me look harder at what I had sent in – and at the work that had been accepted for that exhibition. This is where her association with the RWS began, resulting with Election in 2005.

‘I frequently used gouache to rescue watercolour paintings that had gone wrong and found a medium that suited my method of feeling my way into a painting. I now feel so comfortable working in gouache that I would not return to the anxiety and tensions of working in pure watercolour.‘

Soon after election to the RWS, Wendy also began to teach at West Dean College, West Sussex, where she returned to still life, a subject she had avoided, believing it to be too close to her illustration practice. Wendy says of this genre, now so part of her practice: It is a good subject for a teaching tool as everyone has something before them to paint and a common task bonds the class. For me still life provides an opportunity for experimentation and offers a kind of Zen experience. Having very carefully created the arrangement, which involves thinking hard about the colours and shapes of the objects and background and their position in relation to the fall of the light, you are at a wonderful starting point. Then, while nudging the drawing into place and adjusting the tone and colour, the painting takes over and it becomes something else – not just a transcription of what is there but a condensed version of the visual experience. It is a very mysterious process.

A preference for gouache came after initially beginning to paint in traditional watercolour: I frequently used gouache to rescue watercolour paintings that had gone wrong and found a medium that suited my method of feeling my way into a painting. I now feel so comfortable working in gouache that I would not return to the anxiety and tensions of working in pure watercolour.

The vibrant, dense colours of gouache are a great joy and the wonderful thing is that you can over-paint and change a painting right up to the moment before it goes into a frame. Sometimes paintings that come back to the studio much later come out of frames to be changed.

A painting is only finished for now – in six months I may have a different view.

Wendy’s inspiration and stimulation comes from everyday life, home and travel, but London, the city in which she Wendy Jacob RWS, Homeless Chairs, gouache

lives, remains a subject she has not yet confronted. But she enjoys the huge number of galleries and artists it is home to, I am fascinated to see how different artists achieve resolution in their work. Painting is a solitary activity and sometimes sitting alone in the studio, you miss interaction with other artists. This is when I head off to a gallery and come back refreshed, returning to the studio with a range of solutions to artistic problems and the knowledge that there are no limits to what can be achieved in paint.

As previously mentioned, Wendy was elected as an Associate Member of the RWS in 2005. Her decade of Membership has been one of many opportunities taken and events organised. Not only was Wendy Vice President of the RWS for three years but she has also taken art education to the heart of the Society’s mission statement. The bi-annual Education Programme that she has designed has enabled a wider audience to reach the wonderful world of watercolour through public lectures, family art events and practical workshops and it has required watercolour to be seen in a new and relevant contemporary light.

I will spend this winter in the studio working towards the Spring Exhibition, Made in Colour – and of course thinking hard about creating work with an emphasis on colour, perhaps reflecting the cooler winter light, but maybe taking control and making colour the subject of the painting. It all happens on the easel and it’s difficult to for me to predict what will happen. I am also thinking of extending the gaze and including the setting. Who knows? But there will certainly be some new paintings as well as a few old friends on display at Bankside in the Spring.

Interview by Hatty Davidson

Jonathan Huxley RWS Jonathan Huxley RWS, Missing Persons IV [detail], fluorescent ink with ultraviolet light

Andrew Kalman Crane Kalman Gallery, London I have known Jonathan Huxley since my earliest days in the art business, an incredible 25 years ago. Jonathan was presenting his work in his graduation show at the Royal Academy Schools and I had been asked to judge that year’s class. I was drawn to Jonathan’s work and its strong imagery immediately, as were my fellow judges and accordingly Jonathan was chosen and our artist/ dealer relationship was born.

Not long after I met him, Jonathan started to produce a series of works most easily described as Figurescapes - his iconic, easily recognisable, mainly rectangular, paintings on canvas of figures randomly placed on invariably, but not exclusively, white backgrounds. They suggest people in rapid, variant movement - are they skating, skiing, dancing or simply a representation of the to-ing and fro-ing of quotidian city life? They were immediately popular and sold successfully. They also spawned a large body of works on paper, featuring again figures in all types of activity - horse-riding cowboys, kissing couples, gun-toting bandits and many more, from fantasy to reality.

These bright, colourful images segued into another chapter of Jonathan’s works on paper - spray-painted silhouettes of butterflies, flying insects and gambolling dogs, always suggesting an iridescent, vibrant vitality. These small, elegant works were produced in the late 1990’s and early, 2000’s, as our working relationship and friendship moved into its second decade.

Huxley, now a husband and father, matured into a more sensitive, calmer person but still completely engaged and engaging. At around this time, he spent a year in Seville where the hot sun and intense light of the micro-climate capital of Andalusia, suffused his work with ever greater intensity and colour. Carnival inspired processions of characters and animals in irregularly lined compositions - acrobats, flamenco dancers, clowns, horses and donkeys, all choreographed against the backdrop of a bleached white southern Spanish landscape.

Seville was an intense yet inspiring period in Jonathan’s career - the heat of southern Europe anathema to the artist’s light sensitive world - his pale skin and vulnerable eyesight forced him to work in a darkened studio, windows closed, vision enhanced only by ultra violet light. Ever imaginative and adaptable, this led to another reinterpretation of Jonathan’s ‘Figurescapes’, a three-dimensional mobile of a twisting, floating crowd of characters, human, animal, alien - all fluorescently illuminated, a striking puppet-show theatre of beauty, bobbing and weaving in an elegant, elliptical dance.

More recently, Jonathan has been exploring his ability to produce cartoon-like moments of everyday life in graphite on paper. Like Indian miniatures, they evoke our daily experiences - stories, vignettes encapsulating what Huxley does best, a stylised storytelling of life in our metropolitan world.

Twenty-five years after we first met, I am pleased and proud to say that Jonathan and I are still working together and I am always excited to see what his constantly inventive artistic imagination produces.

Jonathan Huxley RWS

‘The question of representation is central in Huxley’s art: he creates images which, once seen, tend to fade away and disappear in our vision and memory.

And suddenly they re-appear somewhere else on the surface of the canvas or the paper. Did they move? Did we move? The question seems pointless and yet, in an art practice which uses classical media and techniques, who could expect to see an organic constantly-evolving reality? A video, almost.’

‘Erased shadows of charcoal, translucent watercolours and layers of oil so thin that the canvas remains visible underneath. The forms lose their precision and contour and this is the very moment when one is invited to an intimate sensory experience. By merging with the drawn figures, by becoming one of them, we too become the artist’s creation, under his brush or his crayon.’

Oliver Waltman Oliver Waltman Gallery, Paris

Jonathan Huxley RWS, Badass [detail], acrylic & gouache

RWS SPRING 2016 EDUCATION PROGRAMME The Spring Exhibition will as usual be accompanied by a comprehensive education programme. This will include practical workshops at the Heatherley School of Fine Art. A family workshop will also take place at the Gallery on Wednesday 6 April.

The programme also includes a fascinating talk and a Meet the Artists event: On 20th April, Alan Powers will talk about the work of Kenneth Rowntree, who produced a substantial body of watercolour featuring vernacular buildings and scenery as subjects, with a particular interest in interiors.

On 23 April, RWS Members, Francis Bowyer, David Brayne, Michael Collins and Salliann Putman will be at the gallery to give visitors an insight into their working methods and inspirations. www.royalwatercoloursociety.co.uk/events

Caroline McAdam Clark’s sketchbooks, courtesy of the artist

RWS NEWS

ELECTION 2016 Artists working in water-based media (including watercolour, pen & ink, gouache and acrylic) may apply for Associate Membership of the RWS. Closing date: Monday 7 March 2016, 12 noon For more information and to apply: www.royalwatercoloursociety.co.uk/election

CONTEMPORARY WATERCOLOUR COMPETITION 2016 4 - 16 March

Come and see the successful entries to this year’s RWS Competition, which aims to encourage innovation and experimentation in water-based media on paper. We were pleased to have art critic & curator Sam Cornish and gallerist Richard Selby on the judging panel.

Lisa Traxler ARWS, Donnington Wood, acrylic paint, ink, collage, pencil, thread

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RE NEWS

CALL FOR ENTRIES The National Original Print Exhibition is open for entries from the 1st of March. RE Members are welcome to enter, as are printmakers from outside the UK. The judges this year will include: the President and Vice President of the RE; Bruce McLean RA, printmaker; Mike Taylor, Master Printer, Paupers Press and Julia Beaumont-Jones, Curator of Print, Tate Britain.

LONDON ORIGINAL PRINT FAIR The RE is proud once again to be exhibiting at the prestigious London Original Print Fair at the Royal Academy from 5 - 8 May. With work from our newest Student Associates to some of our longest-standing Fellows, our stand promises to be a diverse and impressive representation.

Deadline: 21 June 2016 www.nationalprint.org

AN TH ON MA INT PR D NG AR OU AW NY Y SO MA AW EN Y D & GW KE RS

The RE selected winners from very strong submissions for the Gwen May Award and the Anthony Dawson Young Printmaker Award. Laura Rosser and Masaharu Imamiya became Associate Members for two years and will receive £1000 each. Rob Miles was awarded a prize of £2000 and Alice Irwin £500.

Peter Lawrence RE, Transform Small, wood engraving

SHAKESPEARE: A CELEBRATION The works of William Shakespeare have provided source material for artists ever since they were first performed. There is very little obvious help given by the playwright in the way of visuals or imagery, as beyond scene settings and concise stage directions everything that we have is in the characters’ dialogue. Those exchanges are so rich, however, and the plotlines they reveal so compelling that artists have found an infinite source of inspiration.

My own relationship with Shakespeare began in the early 1990’s when I read an article about actor Sam Wanamaker’s plan to recreate Shakespeare’s iconic Globe Theatre on Bankside. The plan was greatly aided by the discovery of the subterranean remains of the Rose Theatre, which was a near neighbour of the original Globe and a very similar design. Right around the corner from the Rose on Bear Gardens there was a small museum dedicated to Shakespeare and to the burgeoning project. I was hugely impressed by Wanamaker’s devotion to the scheme and it got me trying to think of ways that I could personally help. I decided to do an etching that featured an audience in the Globe and contained references to all 37 of Shakespeare’s plays.

That piece was called The Great Globe Itself and was hanging in the Globe Museum right next to a huge stuffed bear throughout the time that the theatre was being planned and built. Once the theatre opened I was asked by the then marketing manager, Jane Arrowsmith, if I would like to have a further relationship with the theatre. I became a commissioned artist for the Globe throughout Mark Rylance’s ten-year reign as creative director.

The exhibition marking the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death that Bankside Gallery are mounting promises to be wonderful. Apart from providing an excuse to create more Shakespeare- related work myself, what I’m really looking forward to with this exhibition is seeing what others from the RE and RWS come up with.

Watercolour artist Mark Raggett has been given Mychael Barratt PRE Hon RWS, Exit, Pursued by a Bear, screenprint behind-the -scenes access to the theatre. He has already done an immense amount of research on the history of the Globe as he was the artistic director on John Madden’s film Shakespeare in Love. His works will be truly fascinating.

Narrative artists will pick out moments and characters from the plays to depict, but others will find inspiration from lines from the sonnets or from the actual Globe Theatre itself. The building is quite a beautiful addition to the riverfront and I am very curious to see it interpreted by landscape artists. There really is scope for infinite variety from our two Societies.

In the twenty years since it was completed, anyone who has seen a play at the Globe will be truly grateful that Sam Wanamaker had the dream to bring Shakespeare’s work back to its home on Bankside. He sadly never lived to see the building completed but I know that he would have loved the way his plans have come to fruition. I like to think he would also be pleased to see his dream stretching upriver to Bankside Gallery.

Shakespeare: A Celebration will be open 11am - 6pm daily from 29 June - 10 July Mychael Barratt PRE

Martin Ridgwell is an Artist-Printmaker who lives and works in London. In 2006 he was awarded the Gwen May Student Prize from the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers and he was made a Fellow of the RE in 2008.

Tell me about your artistic education…

I was just one of those kids who was always found in the corner scribbling away - and copying. I was always copying pictures from children’s books and comics, first Disney then Look-In. It was always assumed by my teachers that I would go to art college and I rather regret beingpigeon holed at such an early age - looking back it all seems rather sadly predestined; I don’t really remember making any conscious decisions to go to art school, I just kind of went along with it all until one morning to my horror I woke up in Bradford Art College.

When did you start printmaking and why?

I was introduced to printmaking at Bradford. The BA was some weird course where you had to do a bit of something from all the different processes, painting, sculpture etc., it was a bit of a mess really, but we had a great printmaking department run by Alan Marks who was (aside from being a gifted printmaker himself) a very inspiring teacher.

The themes of narrative and storytelling are clear in your prints - tell me about your inspirations…

The first visual works that I recognised as ‘art’ were book illustrations. I would spend hours studying and copying those black and white line drawings, John Tenniel’s Alice, Thomas Henry’s William or Ardizzone’s Little Tim. Even now I still feel a stronger sense of attachment to those illustrators than I do to any ‘fine artist’.

MARTIN RIDGWELL RE /// INTERVIEW Martin Ridgwell RE, Marnie, etching

Martin Ridgwell RE, First Encounter, etching

Martin Ridgwell RE, That Last Summer, etching

They taught me the importance of composition and how to create character and mood by just using line, the kind of stuff that these artists would have been taught as a matter of course, but skills that are very rarely passed on anymore.

friends, who were all quite self-absorbed and borderline unpleasant personalities, but I enjoyed doing it, and at the time I thought they were really funny, but looking back I see they were actually rather dark and depressing. I’ve always thought it was something I would go back to, maybe not as a strip, but perhaps as a graphic novel or similar.

It’s interesting that you mention narrative and storytelling.

As I’ve just explained, story book illustrators were my earliest influences. I very much see myself as a story-teller, but I try not to impose my own narrative on the image, it’s important that it’s left ambiguous enough for the viewer to wade in and find their own story.

Where artists find their inspiration is always a bit of a mystery, however I truly believe that artists throughout their lifetime are only concerned with a very small number of subjects, and that these motifs are already ingrained within their subconscious before they have even reached adulthood. As an adult nothing can quite have such a strong emotive effect on your imagination as those events or discoveries you make as a child or adolescent.

One of your first jobs was as a cartoonist for the comic strip, The On Ones, are there elements of this early work that you have carried with you throughout your career?

I can see that there are links between the cartoons and my prints, content-wise they’re very similar, themes of urban alienation certainly. It centred on a group of twentysomething

Why did you apply to join the RE and how has it affected your career?

I sort of sneaked in through the back door. After completing my MA in Printmaking at Camberwell a friend gave me the details of the Gwen May Student Award. I may have been slightly blasé when I applied, but as soon as I got in I realised how lucky I’d been to have won the award, and what a great opportunity it would be for me as an artist to be a part of the RE. So I took my two years as a Student Member very seriously, sending in work for all the exhibitions and attending all the private views and introducing myself to other Members, which must have helped when I did apply for Associate Membership as the Council were by that time aware of my work and commitment.

When later on I was asked (along with Bren Unwin and then later Louise Hayward) to manage the Student Award, I would always advise the winners to do the same. Being in the RE means that you have a presence in in a distinguished London gallery, so obviously that alone is going to have a positive effect on your career. In 2013, however, I began working as a

print technician for Lazarides Editions. I decided that I needed to put my practice on hold whilst I got to grips with a quite a demanding job, but what was originally meant to be a twelve month break very quickly turned into three years! However, recently I have started to create my own work again.

What is it about black and white printing that you are drawn to?

Have you considered using colour in your work more regularly?

I don’t know why I only work in black and white - that’s just how it is. When I’m starting a new work I begin by creating the original images as finished pencil drawings, so from the start I’m visualising the image in black and white. In my work, I think introducing colour to my etchings wouldn’t add anything to the image, in fact I think it would be a distraction. Once I add colour to an image it feels as though I am recording a scene as I see it

and maybe it understand that printmaking is a skill, like learning to drive a car - anyone can do it, but to do it well is to anticipate a problem and know how to solve it. Master Printers and print technicians are the unsung heroes of our world; they know so much about printing and know how to apply it in producing work for other artists. I certainly think the role of Editioners and Studio Technicians should be celebrated more.

A lot of our Members teach printmaking or are studio technicians or work as studio print Editioners. To do a full day’s work and then go home to produce your own work is, I think, a real achievement. Unless you’re lucky enough not to have to take on a full time job or several part time jobs as most artists have to do to survive, it’s very hard to be an artist in London, so hats off to all those who are struggling to get by in this city, simply because they have a need to express themselves through their art.

‘Where artists find their inspiration is always a bit of a mystery, however I truly believe that artists throughout their lifetime are only concerned with a very small number of subjects, and that these motifs are already ingrained within their subconscious before they have even reached adulthood. As an adult nothing can quite have such a strong emotive effect on your imagination as those events or discoveries you make as a child or adolescent..‘ prevents the viewer from seeing what they want to see? My use of black and white probably stems from childhood, we didn’t have a colour TV till I was 17 so all the images I saw that moved me on some level were all black and white, even those that were originally made in colour. Originally in film and television, black and white was used to represent a truthful depiction of reality whether in a fictional film or a documentary, while colour was used for fantasy, and on some level I still think like that.

How has taking time out of your practice (and working in a more technical/commercial role) affected your return to creating your own work?

I feel like I’ve learnt an awful lot in the last three years, especially working closely with Master Printer Peter Bennett. One thing I’ve learnt is that there are people out there who know so much about printmaking, it’s intimidating. People like Bennett

What are you working on at the moment?

I don’t want to talk too much about my latest project as it’s early days yet, but at present it concerns an all-male community who all wear Aran knitwear and live in the countryside in the early seventies. They are humanity’s last defence against an alien invasion, but like I said it’s early days yet...!

Interview by Hatty Davidson

RE Member, Sally McLaren, will be holding a solo show, In Search of Stillness, at Bankside Gallery from 12 - 24 July.

This exhibition shows the most recent drawings, prints and paintings in the context of a body of work spanning more than sixty years; a celebration. Sally McLaren’s drawings are minimal, sometimes just a few graphite lines on paper. The recent prints are large in format and beautiful in their simplicity. Earlier prints are carefully composed from cut-up plates, which capture the sense of the land worked by agriculture.

The paintings have a sense of being the definitive expression of her love for the landscape. Instinctively painted, they convey a sense of place in exquisite colour.

‘My drive hasn’t changed over all these years of working, it doesn’t vary - it is simply the drive to celebrate life.’

In Search of Stillness is a title the artist herself lit upon

during the making of a book about her work, which has in turn become the title for this show. Her latest work is her most confident. She has reached a point where her continuous years of practice have led to a place where her work has a serene clarity. McLaren is at her very best; she is selling more work than ever, she is represented in private and public collections internationally and she is now a British woman artist of considerable standing.

However, she does not rest on her laurels; she continues to start each day, in the early hours, with a walk across the fields before going into her studio again. There is certainly more to come.

McLaren became immersed in landscape early in her life and it has remained the subject and the starting point of all her work.

It is the landscape that dictates my imagery… it’s like a conversation. I feel I have been at one with the land since being a small child.

SALLY MCLAREN In Search of Stillness

Sally McLauren RE, Hollyhocks, 1964 [detail], pen & ink

As a child, her interest in art was constantly encouraged both at home and at school, where she had one of those inspirational teachers, Jozeph Natanson. Further study took off at the University of Perugia where she studied History of Art and Literature. During holidays, Natanson, now working in Rome, offered her the use of his flat as a starting point to explore the city and its rich artistic legacy.

From there, she went on to study at The Ruskin School of Art where, after a quiet start drawing and painting from plaster casts of Greek figures, she became involved with the Oxford University acting societies working on sets and in the props and wardrobe departments. Her summers were busy, in what were the early days of The Edinburgh Fringe, with a sparkling array of young talent.

After three years at the Ruskin, she completed her postgraduate degree in the Fine Art Department at the Central School of Art and Design in London where she became absorbed in the practice of intaglio printing. Afterwards she spent a year printmaking with S. W. Hayter at Atelier 17 in Paris, before returning to London to begin a teaching post at Goldsmiths College.

In her classes at The Central she remembers being encouraged to recognise that ‘what you leave out is as important as what you put in.’ After a meticulous and traditional art education this was refreshing. It was a moment when she was first aware of being ‘freed up’ and given the freedom to develop a visual language which was not strictly representational. At The Central she was blessed with an extraordinary tutor, Tony Harrison, who taught her etching. His guidance sparked a fascination with the medium, which not only gave her the tools to study at Atelier 17 but also a commitment to etching, which continues to this day.

Already an admirer of the Impressionists, she also had a particular love for the work of Bonnard and Matisse. She was an early devotee of the artists of the St Ives group, especially Pasmore, Hilton and Nicholson, and British Modernist painters such as Hitchens and Vaughan. Living in London with access to major shows allowed her to see artists from outside mainland Europe. She particularly remembers seeing the work of the American, Diebenkorn, and Abstract Expressionists such as Tobey, Motherwell and Rothko, and being struck by the size of their work, their use of paint, simplicity of composition and use of colour.

If travel broadens the mind then it must surely have a place in the life of an artist. McLaren’s work has been enriched by what she has seen of the world; early trips in the sixties with her friend and fellow artist Barbara Newcomb, camping along

Sally McLauren RE, Untitled, 2010, monoprint

the coast of California and in the midst of the Redwoods and youth hostelling in the highlands of Scotland, walking the hills of vividly coloured heather and exploring rocky shores. Taught to sail as a child, she and her husband continued to explore coastlines of the world, often as crew members on the boats of friends.

In over sixty years of working, the development and simplification in the form and structure of her paintings has evolved. Recent drawings seem precise in their energy.

I like being alone when working, she says, I wonder at the earth we live on, its glory, its seasons. I become immersed in it, not separate from it.

The most important thing in life for me is about finding stillness, feeling a central core and expanding from that. It is being part of a whole with nature and humanity.

Sally McLaren In Search of Stillness: 12 - 24 July 2016 The show is accompanied by the launch of a limited edition book: Sally McLaren: In Search of Stillness, edited by Silvie Turner and Ruaridh Webster, with an essay by Mel Gooding, will be published in July 2016.

Ruaridh Webster

Giclée Or Glacé!

Giclée, was the name originally applied to fine art prints created on *IRIS type printers in the 1980’s. It has since come to mean any inkjet print. It is a term often used by artists, galleries, museums, and some print studios, to suggest high quality reproduction printing, often in limited editions.

It is an unregulated word (made up) and thus has no associated warranty of quality!

The authentic, and the false, a realisation

by David Ferry RE

Giclée; to be honest I first stumbled on a similar-sounding word many years ago as a child.

It was more like Glacé and something to do with ice cream. Anyway I didn’t really take much notice at the time, as long as I got that ice-lolly! Sometimes words sound the same, and that can lead to confusion.

Subjective associations can also lead to confusion, second-guessing and preconception. So it’s important to extrapolate properly, the difference between words that sound roughly the same, to understand the difference between them. This means that conclusions and inferences are not misconstrued, and as we will discover, there can be a problem with translations, particularly if a (unregulated) word was originally from another language.

In the contemporary environment of mass graphic/image reproduction, the ‘hand made’ (and the virtue of such) is an important consideration. There is a huge difference between one sort of pictorial reproduction and another.

David Hockney pronounced *‘Fax Art’ many years ago. Likewise photocopy art, is also now a fantastic genre principally when associated to the imaginative world of Book Art and Zines. It is a cheap, fluid, and streetwise; a marvel of our modern age; the graphic face of Punk Rock was almost predicated on the ’photocopy’!

So for a context about the digital reproduction/print, I sought a second opinion.

Extracts from a conversation between David Ferry and John Philips.

The Patient: David Ferry The Consultant: John Philips.

The Surgery: The London Print Studio.

I told John I had a problem!“Tell me John, what is a Giclée? And do you know what it means, is it art, is it curable, terminal or infectious?”

The Patient: David Ferry The Consultant: John Philips.

The Surgery: The London Print Studio.

John told me this most wonderful of language anomalies, a veritable cautionary tale in the collaging of existing words and cultures!

“David, the term, Giclée was first devised by a master printer called John Dugannein 1991, working for Nash Editions in the USA and using some high end graphic software. He was looking for a descriptive word that would dispel any negative connotations associated with the fine print, such as inkjet, or at worst computer generated, in the context of its validity as a fine print. The actual word Giclée is a hybrid, based on the French word ‘gicleur ’ (to squirt; through a nozzle). However it also commonly understood, in French slang, to mean the male ejaculation!” ‘‘Gosh’’ I replied, “like out of a script for Carry on Printmaking!”

To digress for a moment, the London Print Studio is designed purposefully to have no overt ‘accent’ in relation to the ‘process of print’. There is a structural area dedicated to the

traditional models of etching/lithography/screen and relief printmaking and an area defined by computers and inkjet printers; these practically orchestrated identities are connected architecturally by a gallery, a sales area, archive and the front desk. A kind of thesaurus and dictionary all in one!

So to get back to the essential question; what is Giclée? I think we have to go back to understand printmaking’s vast histories, and conclude that the ink jet, is simply another creative process combining technical merit with artistic intent. This artistic intent is effectively enhanced by process (coupled with the fact that artists have always been very good at the appropriation of existing technologies).

I am careful here in not advocating ‘traditional printmaking’ as having any more virtue than a digital one.

However without the important equation of idea through process, any print is worthless, whatever it’s made of!

IN FOCUS | DIGITAL PRINTS

We concluded that the term ‘Giclée’ is a rather random word, and not a good one at that, clearly unfortunate in its more coarse connotations!

In further conversation we focused our attention on the contemporary photographic process. We discussed the photo-print and pondered the historic time line of photography, and *Senefelder’s discovery of the lithographic process.

These discoveries, and the correlation between them, changed the world of the commercial and fine art graphic reproduction forever.

John’s new print series ‘Vanitas’ exploits the many merits of two digital processes (photo and inkjet) to create extraordinary fidelity and deft. John builds many layers (shots) of a subject, and then prints it out an inkjet printer, producing a definition of velvet-like texture, depth and colour. These extraordinary fine prints are realized through a total immersion in subject matter, via a delight in process.

A stark comparison then, to the commercially cynical ‘reproductions’ found in the museum gift shop, which exploit pre-existing works of art made originally in another medium altogether! We are lead to believe that these facsimiles are somehow repossessed with new vitality via the term Giclée, and the equally over-marketed term, the limited edition.

We can have limited edition 4x4 ‘Chelsea Tractors’, fridges, cookers, chocolates, and fine prints. All have morphed together in the trough of market induced commercial desire.

The gullible ‘squirted’ on by the unscrupulous!

At the end of our conversation I asked John how he describes his new prints. “They are inkjet prints of course! Whatever else could they be? “ Dr John Philips is an artist and Director of the London Print Studio.

Some of his art is realized via the inkjet process.

Prof. David Ferry in an artist and Head of Printmaking at the Cardiff School of Art and Design. Some of his art is also realised via the inkjet process.

Notes: Fax Art, a term first coined in the early 1980’s. A medium used by many influential contemporary artists most famously in the UK by David Hockney An Iris printer is a large-format color inkjet printer introduced in 1985 by Iris Graphics in Stoneham, Massachusetts and currently manufactured by the Graphic Communications Group of Eastman Kodak, designed for prepress proofing.

Johann Alois Senefelder (1771-1834) invented lithography in 1796. (The earliest known printed photographic image was in 1827 by Joseph Nicephore Niépce, 1765-1833).

Left image: David Ferry RE, Bend in the Road’, inkjet print glued on to 12-inch vinyl record, acrylic varnish and gold spray paint Above image: John Philips, Vanitas XVll, inkjet print

Bankside Gallery | 48 Hopton Street | London SE1 9JH | 020 7928 7521 | info@banksidegallery.com www.banksidegallery.com | www.royalwatercoloursociety.co.uk | www.re-printmakers.com Cover image: Ann Wegmuller RWS, Shore Song [detail], gouache