Reduction Linoprint by Steve Manning
Pollarded Willow
Steve Manning
I am an Exeter based print maker who began printmaking at the Double Elephant Print Workshop in Exeter and now work out of my own attic studio commanding fine views of clouds and sky.
I work predominantly with lino, employing a combination of multi-block and reduction printing to produce spacious landscapes inspired by the open vistas of moorland, marsh and estuary. Reduction printing is a challenging discipline because, as the process progresses, the lino block is gradually destroyed as subsequent layers are cut away. This leaves little room for error and ensures no further prints can be made once the edition is complete.
I am particularly interested in skies and clouds, and these provide the focus of my images, the cloudscape often informing and influencing the overall composition of the completed print. For me the challenge is to render distant vistas and ethereal skies using a medium usually associated with bold blocks of colour. I achieve this by either lightening colours with white or thinning them with extender. The end result is prints which could be described as having a ‘painterly’ quality.
Relief printmaking is not a spontaneous discipline. The creation of my prints is a painstaking, frustrating, frequently complicated and an occasionally unsuccessful exercise using a medium not entirely suited to rendering the ephemeral nature of my chosen subject matter! I should be a watercolourist, but I love the combination of craft and fine art printmaking offers.’
My prints are produced in small, limited editions and have been exhibited in many places including the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol.
I am member of the South West Academy of Fine and Applied Arts, Make Southwest and The Somerset Guild of Craftsmen.
Reduction Linoprint
21x30cm
Unframed
Edition of 10