In July 2019, I decided it was time to start creating artwork again after a long period of doing nothing creative that stretched back years. I had studied graphic design at university, failed to get anywhere with that, farted about with some websites for a bit and then, with life-in-general taking over, I just kind of stopped doing anything creative. So I signed up for a one day life drawing class at Morley College, which was reasonably close to where I lived at the time. I thoroughly enjoyed it and created the pencil drawing below which you’ve probably already seen on the front page of the website.
Above the studio we used for that life drawing class, there was a print making studio full of all sorts of exciting presses and tools, the likes of which I hadn’t used since I was on my art foundation course in 1999.
A few months after the life drawing class, I decided it was time to sign up for a longer printmaking course in the evenings, as Morley college was in between work and home and very easy to get to from both. The course was scheduled to last a few weeks, and as a newbie I was going to be working in linocut. I spent the first week messing around and getting a feel for how linocut worked before I would move on spending a few weeks concentrating on one piece and producing several prints.
I decided to go for a Mexican themed design centred around a luchador mask and sketched out the design below.
Unfortunately, this class was taking place in March 2020, and you may remember a certain global pandemic put a sudden stop to going out of the house for quite a long time. When we went into lockdown, I had only worked on two layers of the linocut before putting all of my materials in my draw, not knowing I would not be coming back and I would never see them again! The photos below are all I have left of that work, and I didn’t even get the chance to take a decent photo of the in- progress print.
After the lockdowns, I didn’t think there was much chance of getting it back. It may have stayed in the same draw the whole time waiting for me to return. It may have been finished by someone else who found it and created their own master piece from it. It probably got thrown away once life got back to normal again.
So I’ll never know how the completed print was going to look. I never did anymore print making either, as I moved after lockdown and haven’t found anything near me where I can try it out again and I don’t think I can afford a printing press.
Matt Hart 