Interview to the artist by Rachelle Gryn Brettler, from our Anniversary Book
My pleasure in printmaking is that I can bring in so many elements: my drawing, photography — I tend to work with photographs that I have taken myself. I am particularly drawn to architecture — street scenes, buildings and found imagery from magazines or vintage postcards. I am also drawn to fabrics, and so I bring a lot of found fabrics into my work. I love to scour flea markets searching for different components.Then I layer them up together like a jigsaw puzzle. And there are so many permutations. Every time I work on a new series, I am still discovering something new. There are endless possibilities and I think that is what keeps me hooked on printing, is that I still find new ways of making. It keeps it exciting because there is always more...
I combine different printmaking techniques in my work — mostly silkscreen printing and all sorts of intaglio techniques like etching, relief printing, monoprinting, collagraph. You really can print on anything flat although I do not work on fabric. I only work on paper, but I love to explore different papers and there are so many beautiful printmaking papers available. I always choose a paper to suit the project. For example, I was working with vintage photographs, in fact photos of my mother, and I felt it needed an off-white rather than a bright white. I work with colours that are not ordinarily put together — so very subtle colours mixed with bright colours and I use a lot of neon. I love to include little elements that add subtleties — maybe text that I have scribbled myself or found in a newspaper or from family postcards.
There is a juxtaposition of working with water-based inks with silkscreen printing and then layering on top oil-based inks, this marriage of different qualities of inks brings lots of texture to the work. In printmaking, there is a technical aspect to it so I cannot walk into the studio and hope for the best. I have an idea in my head, but it can shift; there are often what I call these happy accidents that happen along the way. In printmaking you mostly have to start off in black and white, then colour choices are made in the studio at the time. In the pre-planning, I often work with transparencies — which can be as simple as putting vegetable oil on photocopies, and then I can see how things can overlap each other and fit together. I have recently been working on a series of mountain prints. After lockdown, I needed to do something different and I went hiking, with a guide, in the French Alps, around the Mont Blanc massif, and took photographs. In the series, the colours were inspired by those I saw on the mountain. I have included text in prints — one is called Small Steps, another is Dig Deep, and there is Slow and Steady.These were all little slogans that our guide would repeat to us, almost like a mantra to keep us going onwards on our journey.
I was born and grew up in London, with an English father and a mother who had family in France. Each summer we were taken off to a family house in central France owned by my mum’s cousin, whose partner, twenty five years her senior, was an amazing man — a famous French abstract artist, sculptor and architect — Edgard Pillet. I would spend all my summers there, up until the age of sixteen, which is when he died. His studio was in the house, and I would watch him for hours, and we talked and I loved him like a grandfather. He had a very strong influence on me. He taught me how to draw, how to look at things differently. He bought me a beautiful set of colouring pencils. And I remember one day we drew one of the outhouses, and he made me see colours on it that I had not really noticed before. I suppose he made me look at things in a certain way and I think it really stemmed from there.
I did a degree in fine art. I went in there a painter but never really felt like a painter and halfway through my degree course I fell into the print room, and I never left.