Artists are now using photopolymer plates to produce a wide range of printed imagery. They handle both text and image very well, and are extremely user friendly.  A drawing or photograph on transparent film, can be placed on the photopolymer plate and exposed to ultraviolet light.

A course member commented after taking the Photopolymer for Intaglio 14th July course;

“Great course – I learned a lot, all aspects were relevant. Although there were 8 of us it felt like one-to-one. Thank you!”

We are pleased to be featuring new work from Lorna Scobie in our gallery and on-line shop. Lorna has produced a range of digital print and lino-cut cards and screenprints on high quality Somerset Paper. Lorna’s colourful creature prints have been produced in our Print Studio and make perfect gifts for friends and family!

View the beautiful collection below and on-line here.

Etching as a process was developed as a quicker, looser, less labour intensive alternative to engraving.  An image could be drawn through a wax ground, and the corrosive action of acid used to etch the lines into the metal plates. Participants  printed examples of each of these processes and left with these prints and their plates.

For more information and to book on one of our next courses please click HERE

Alex has been busy in the studio producing a lino-cut comic, Alex wrote a few words about her current work;

“I am interested in creating art with a strong sense of narrative. I have recently been experimenting with combining single or sequential lino cut prints with text. I am inspired by the little eccentricities of people and stories of ‘ordinary’ people doing extraordinary things.”

View Alex Bradys’ website and shop here.

Image: Alex Brady

Selected artists will receive:

•    Studio and Gallery Membership (valid for 1 year).
•    25 sessions (3 hours per session).
•    1 course of their choice.
•    3 mentoring Sessions.
•    3 hours One to One Training with our coordinators.

The award will last 3 months from a mutually agreed start date. During this 3 month period the artists will be able to use their 25 sessions to further their practice using a wide range of processes including Screenprinting, Etching, Stone Lithography, Photopolymer, Letterpress, Relief, Photography, Film and Digital.

Artists will be encouraged, through mentoring and one to one sessions, to push the boundaries of their practice and indeed the processes available.

The journey which the artists take will be documented at every stage through photos, monthly reviews and a video interview; all of which will be available for all to view from the New Graduate blog on the londonprintstudio website.

Please attach up to 5 images with this completed Application Form to apply@londonprintstudio.org.uk with the subject New Graduate Award by Friday 27th September 2013.

You can also view the New Graduate Award Info here.

 Image: Maaike Stevens, Graduate Award 2012

Selected artworks from our current exhibition Carte Blanche will transfer to Northern Print in Newcastle at the end of the show – we’re pleased as LPS staff curated the exhibition, and people are clearly enjoying the show. If you haven’t seen it yet, do come over- the show continues until the end of June.

We also have a new exhibition opening soon at Rochester Art Gallery in Kent. It’s called The Illustrator’s Art and features londonprintstudio artists Lynn Hatzius, Matthew Pagett, and Andrzej Krauze. The work from last year’s Andrzej Krauze exhibition ‘Cutting’ is travelling to Warsaw where it will appear in an exhibition opening in November.

Christie’s Multiplied Art Fair every October is one of the highlights of the year for contemporary printmakers as it’s devoted exclusively to contemporary art in editions, artists books and 3D multiples.This year Christies have asked us to participate in a special exhibition with Robert Blackburn Studio in NYC and Artists Proof Studio in Johannesburg. We will also have an LPS stand in the commercial area of the show where we will be selling prints. It’s very exciting; we’re working on the show and will let you know all about it as soon as we can.

We will start selection for the 2013 Graduate Award Scheme soon. If you know anyone who is graduating this year, do let them know about the scheme.

We would have been very sorry to lose Ann-Marie Rayney and Elena Ortiz who were working with us as interns; in fact both have agreed to join the extended londonprintstudio team and will continue to work in the print studio and on projects. We can now welcome our next interns Micheal Davies, Alice Valentina Biga and Alice Gauthier to the print studio.

We were very sad to say goodbye (for now!) to Tarlan Rafiee and Yashar Samimi Mofakham who have been in the studio and a very important part of the Tehran Calling exhibition. They have been truly inspirational, and we wish them great success in their future artistic ventures. Yashar has produced a wonderful catalogue of the Tehran Calling London Portfolio which is available to view and purchase here.

Image: Lynn Hatzius

The course is run by our Print Studio Technician Catriona Leahy, an MA Printmaking student from the Royal College of Art, who has previously taught as a Print Coordinator at the Black Church Print Studio, Dublin.

Each participant left with an edition of prints, using at least 5 different layers/colours.

For more information and to book on one of our next courses please click HERE

We offer One to One Training in the digital studio with a 20% discount concessionary rate to all graduates of less than two years, students and over 60s. Registered users of the studio can also receive discounts on large print orders.

Image: Jess Littlewood

Artists currently preparing major projects in our studio include Israeli artist, Amikam Toren who now works and lives in London and British artist, Jess Littlewood. Amikam has displayed work in solo exhibitions in New York, Paris, Tel Aviv and London. Through photography and the alteration of old paintings and canvases Amikam addresses the basic nature of an object or an image and uses its own material, purpose or form to re-present it in a way that is an ‘improvement’ or re-invention of its original state.

Jess Littlewood has been working hard in the digital studio at londonprintstudio getting ready for her upcoming exhibition ‘Island Folly’ at Bearspace Gallery in Deptford. Jess graduated with a BA First Class Honors from Central Saint Matins College of Art and Design in 2010, and currently works from her studio in Brixton. ‘Island Folly’ features a collection of intriguing, fictitious landscapes built up from multiple layers of archival and found imagery.

Island Folly / Bearspace Gallery /  Deptford / 31 May 2013 – 29 June 2013

Image: Amikam Toren

Our digital studio manager Constantina Riala says ‘Understanding artists and their individual requirements is hugely important when you’re working on high level creative projects. It’s all a question of trust and reliability, particularly when you are working to developing images for experimental work. It’s very rewarding for me to see fantastic projects emerge from the studio and get exhibited round the world.’

Booking

The Digital Studio is open Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, 10.30am – 5.30pm.

For bookings, training and printing you can contact our digital studio by phone or email:

E: digital@londonprintstudio.org.uk

T: 020 8969 3247 (then press option 4)

For more details about what our digital studio can offer please look HERE.

To view our current price list please look HERE.

The London Original Print Fair (25 to 28 April) at the Royal Academy, with its combination of old master dealers and contemporary galleries and publishers, caters for an established, considerably wealthier market. One admirable aspect of the contemporary printmaking world is its capacity to generate these two polarities within a stones throw of each other. The overarching aim of both fairs – to generate and exchange artists’ prints – is identical. And while many of the players have been educated in the same institutions, and many similar technologies are employed, the spirit, economic and aesthetic choices displayed in these parallel events are quite divergent.  

This difference may be entirely the attribute of a generation gap, with one fair for the new kids on the block, and the other for an older crowd. But I suspect  that there is something else at play, something that is more about the spirit of the age in which we now find ourselves than the age of the individual participants involved. By and large, the Original Print Fair represents a model of fine-art production and distribution (artist/masterprinter/publisher/dealer/audience) that has dominated the market for the past two hundred years or so. Many of  Pick Me Up’s participants appear to be returning to a model of self-production and promotion (artist/audience – unmediated by others) that typified  the earliest period of print culture in Europe.

Referring to this period of innovation Erwin Panofsky noted that ‘the multiplying arts permitted the artist to take the initiative…. Thus, the graphic media became a vehicle of self-expression long before self-expression had been accepted as a principle of what is called the major arts’. But this new iteration comes at a price. Reaching out directly to a wide audience today involves – in the visual arts in particular- communication across cyberspace and this constraint favours certain types of imagery over others. Images best placed to thrive in this environment must be capable of being shrunk to thumbnails without significant loss of content, and this inevitably limits the works content at any scale. Thus much of the work on display at Pick Me Up and The Original Art Fair can be seen as examples of an increasingly common polarisation, between content and price light on the one hand, and content and price heavy on the other hand.

Whether the Art’s Minister’s recent reiteration –  that the subsidised arts sector will be judged primarily on its contribution to the economy – will help to reconcile or worsen this divide is a key question. Continuous government support for the arts in Britain is a relatively recent initiative. It emerged as an emergency war-time (WWII) morale boosting measure with the formation of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) in 1939, and continued with CEMA’s transformation into the Arts Council in 1945. The premise underlying this initiative was that during times of extreme adversity the arts could play an important role in supporting social cohesion, and in times of economic instability government had a responsibility to fulfil the role of patron. In the UK, these were new and unprecedented big ideas. The record of government cultural subsidy in the previous 200 years had been intermittent, reluctant, and, given the economic foundation of Empire, miserly in the extreme. In a BBC interview in 1945, John Maynard Keynes, who had served as CEMA’s chair, outlined the new Arts Council’s role in  supporting the artist who ‘cannot be told his direction; he does not know it himself. But he leads the rest of us into fresh pastures and teaches us to love and enjoy what we often begin by rejecting, enlarging our sensibility and purifying our instincts. The task of an official body’, Keynes added, ‘is not to teach or censor, but to give courage, confidence and opportunity’.

Image: Pick Me Up

Fiona Hepburn was educated at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen, and the Royal College of Art in London, where she studied printmaking. Her work has appeared in a large number of exhibitions in Scotland and in London; she has been awarded a number of prizes for her work, and she is our featured artist this month.

Her beautiful prints find inspiration from her Scottish heritage and natural history. She makes work in response to found organic objects, and is fascinated by the architecture of the objects she collects. Her images are studies of found material, deconstructing and magnifying surfaces and interpreting formations and cyclical workings. Objects are enlarged, dissected and broken down – growing and metamorphosing into something else. Her drawings become an obsessive reproduction of a single shape. Drawing repetitive forms and the cyclical workings of madrepoic formations, create the illusion of ruined cities and geology.

As a printmaker she is interested in the construction and reconstruction of prints, layering colours and images upon each other. With the ability to ‘reproduce’ through print, she takes on nature’s obsessive role of reproducing thousands of tiny spores or holes, growing like mould. Her prints become physical objects that evoke the feeling of growth and a strong sensory experience of fragility and tactility, provoking a desire to touch. The labour intensive, irreversible and destructive process is an integral part of her practice, and mimics the precarious, fragile state of the natural world.

Image: Fiona Hepburn