Helen Brown is a landscape artist, a printmaker, living in Sussex.
She has been passionate about art and printing since she was a child and is still just as passionate today. Helen spends a lot of her time on the South Downs where she takes inspiration from and creates her artwork immediately. She loves capturing the feeling of the space she is in, the movement, the texture of the landscape, the atmosphere of her surroundings there and then rather than leaving that feeling behind and trying to recreate it later. Helen’s enthusiasm really is infectious and has led her down many busy paths including currently co-owning and running art printmaking workshops at Bip-Art in Brighton’s Kemp Town where she gets just as much of a kick out of seeing her students learn and blossom under her guidance and teaching. She proudly explains that she has seen some of the students at her workshops go on to be masters graduates, successful artists and some winning awards for their work!
Bearing all this is mind we feel very lucky to have Helen at The Artists and Makers fair this year, we are sure you will agree that her prints of the South Downs are totally breathtaking!
I spoke to Helen about her career, her inspiration and her love of printmaking:
I have always been an artist. My first prints were with potatoes, now I use wood.
How did your career get started?
I went on a school trip to Kip Greshams printmaking studio in Cambridgeshire, I was hooked the minute I smelt the ink. With the help of my dad I set up a screen printing (I did start out as a screen printer, now make my work with woodcut) room in a cupboard in my school. With the door firmly closed and no ventilation I spent hours creating colourful works using rather toxic screen inks!
Can you describe your creative process?I always draw from life, always. The landscape is my inspiration, so where ever I am that is what my work becomes. I draw my image, transfer it in reverse to a wooden block, carve it and print it using various techniques such as blends, masking, jigsaw and chine colle. I teach all these and more in my studio bip-art.co.uk
How do you choose the subject of your woodcuts? Where do you get inspiration?The landscape I am in! I love landscapes and will produce them wherever I am. I love the South Downs because it is constantly changing. Every few steps seem to reveal a completely different view. The light too can change the landscape completely so that Mount Caburn can look like a small hill or a mountain. The Downs are so open and expansive and yet I feel calm and happy within them.
How has your style changed over the years? How would you describe your style now?
I’ve come a long way from my potato prints.. My style over the years has seen me working abstractly to figurative, when at art school (I trained in Cambridge and the Brighton for degree) I experimented with many types of printmaking mediums. I settled on woodcut about 15/20 years ago as my main meduim, and landscape as my inspiration.
What is the most challenging part about being a printmaker?Getting the ink out from under my fingernails.
Where do you work? Can you describe your workspace?I have two workspaces, one is the vast outdoors, namely the South Downs, and the other is bip-Art Printmaking Workshop www.bip-art.co.uk in Brighton, of which I am a co-director, where I print my blocks. I use a 1844 Colombian press to print my work, which is amazing and still works as well as it ever did. I have printed all my work on this press, I love to think about what came before and the things this press might have printed before it came to out studio.
What is your typical working day?
There is not so much a typical day but rather a flow to my life, revolving around running the studio, teaching courses from the studio (which I love doing) and making my own work. This flow is connected to the seasons of the year, I tend to draw more in the summer (or when it is dry, warm, clear days) and print more in the winter months. My woodblocks are small editions of 35, yet when I make them I can only print say 5 at a time, as it takes a day to do that many, this means to complete my edition can take up to 7 years! I have over 40 images I am currently working from, which get added to and finished each year.
If you could meet an artist from history who would it be and why?There would of course be hundreds but choosing one now I would say Rembrandt, solely for the reason, that when I visited his house in Amsterdam the audio tour starts with someone saying he died depressed, penniless and alone (its not the ideal start to the tour one thinks!) I’d like to go back and tell him it all comes good, his family do great out of his legacy and he’s still admired today!
What advice would you give to someone just starting out in printmaking?
Come and join our studio in Brighton! bip-Art Printmaking!
If you would like to see more of Helen’s work and find out about her workshops you can also visit her website for further information.
Advertisements Share this:
