Today I had the most fantastic day at the V&A linocut class. I had never done linocuts before and as it is a relatively easy form of print, and one that can have a clear manual hand, I thought I should give it a go.
First we looked at actual linocut prints from the V&A collection. There was a simple handmade booklet by Morris Cox who set up the Gog Magog Press; a simple line cut from Matisse(!); one by Babette Katz about a visual train journey, and another about knitting; and one about Ockers from Australia. This is what makes V&A classes so different venues. You get to see great resource material from their archive, and presumably this recorded in some form of stats that support the running costs of the museum.
The lead artist, Nick Morley (linocut boy.com), earns his living as a linocut artist and does commissions for Penguin and Faber publishers amongst others. He showed various simple book forms, and I was particularly taken with books with two spines, on the right and left and pages split in the centre. His book "Throne Together" had Lino cuts of different kings on the left and queens on the right, so you could vary which characters met each other, eg the frog prince could meet the mermaid princess or the Red Queen from Alice inWonderland.
We did a little sample block so we could learn how the tools worked, then my first block was a simple colander image to fit with my theme of Women's Work.
Must rush. Off to day 2 of the class.
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