|
|
|
|
January 2025
I live in The Lake District close to Derwentwater and surrounded by much walked fells… Blencathra, Skiddaw, Catbells, and the horseshoe ridges of Newlands valley and Coledale. While there is always grandeur close at hand it is the local and small things of nature that spark something in me, the living things, the things that breathe; plants, flowers and trees are miraculous combinations of simplicity and complexity and often the attempted subject of my prints. Over time the number of these prints in my home has grown, however, and the question arose of what to do with them. So, I have started to put them out there, displaying and selling them in local shops and small galleries and decided to create a website too as a way of sharing them with people who might be interested.
|
Vertical Divider
|
© Lauren Ashby 2024
|
The house I now live in is called The Croft. It was built during the Arts and Crafts period, a time when artists and craftsmen and women wanted to preserve and celebrate the beauty of nature and her organic forms in their homes, in fabrics and furniture and everyday objects— a response to the rapid industrialisation and mechanisation of daily life taking place. The line between craft and art naturally blurred.
I liked the name ‘The Croft’ though don’t know anything about its former occupants and what they did with their time. It evokes an attitude, an approach to living in a more direct relationship with the natural world, an acknowledgment of our dependence on nature of which we are an integral part. It reminds of the need to use our hands as well as our minds in living a life. I like the silence of printmaking, a quiet space in a world where words often dominate. It gives me a time to think without words, to use my senses, time for things to find their place. A space to look at the flowerhead chosen, to observe, to become absorbed in a sensuous sort of reverie and enjoy the beauty of its structure, its texture, its colour and to try and capture something of these qualities in ink on paper
Vertical Divider
|
|
Yet there is something more to the whole process which is hard to put into words. In the introductory essay to Robert Kushner’s 'Wild Gardens’, art critic Amy Goldin makes the point, ‘Decoration may lack intellectual freight but it is not stupid.’[1] Kushner is influenced by ancient traditions of the East in affording the flower a central place in art and the decorative crafts, a symbol of harmony and of an approach that acknowledges humanity’s perception of nature, of transient moments of beauty and the brevity of life. He also follows the path of other artists operating at the intersection of decoration and painting such as Gustav Klimt, Odilon Redon, Eduard Vuillard. Kushner: ‘As finely bred refinements of nature flowers have a paradoxical natural artifice’.
[1] Robert Kushner is an American contemporary artist who works on large scale decorative screens where floral composition and balance are the focus. Ref: Wild Gardens ISBN 10: 0-7649-3769-3 (2006) Vertical Divider
|
|
I have no training in art, but I’ve always made things since childhood and I think I see printmaking in this light, creation of a tangible object with a direct aesthetic appeal. I like my prints to find a home, the idea of them becoming part of someone’s domestic sphere, hopefully giving that person a moment of pleasure or calm from time to time. I have more time now that I know longer do the work that pre-occupied my professional life and my girls are grown up. A long time ago on a visit to Edinburgh I saw some prints done by artists at Edinburgh Printmakers in a window display and something lodged. I wanted to try and do that one day. Years later I did a part time course in printmaking at Leith School of Art with my youngest daughter in fact, but only quite recently did I buy a modern and large press which has become a kind of additional presence in the house, shared with my husband and Holly and Bramble our border terriers, littermates and currently 13 years old. It’s interesting to start forging a relationship with essentially a piece of machinery, getting to know its subtleties and vagaries and also its possibilities.
|
Vertical Divider
|
Printmaking involves quite a lot of practical preparation beforehand and a fair bit of cleaning up afterwards too. I like it all, for me it is enjoyable, meditative, creative. Flower heads remain a regular source of inspiration with their infinite variety of form and colour, so too trees with their monumental structures and constantly changing states. I like to try and capture the lines and shapes whether it is something that strikes me in my garden as it passes through the shifting seasons, a plant or flower growing in a hedgerow, the light on a particular day picking out something in a field or on a hillside when I’m out walking my dogs, or by the shores of the lake near my home which never looks the same two days in a row.
Printmaking has now become part of my everyday life. When I get out the things I need and sit on the stool at the table I use I feel a sense of simple pleasure at the stretch of time ahead, when I can just give my attention to the task with no goal other than to focus and use my hands and become absorbed. I enjoy all the elements it involves, from having an initial idea for a print when something catches my eye, through to designing the plate— which might be lino, wood, plastic or metal— choosing tools, cutting the outlines, mixing colours with a palette knife on the glass surface I use, rolling ink onto the plate, registering the paper, and finally putting the print through the press. On one side of the roller is something raw, unfinished, hopeful. On the other is something which has been transformed by what always feels like a bit of magic. When I peel the paper away from the plate there is always a moment……. when the image that had been in my mind’s eye has now been translated into the actual image I now hold in my hand….. sometimes a moment of pleasure and satisfaction, sometimes a disappointment, but always a small revelation of some kind.
