Michael Gage

Last night, we went to the opening of the SGFA Exhibition at the Menier Gallery in London.

Found one of my prints in the window!

Photos (C) William de Wilde

Fred Cuming, RA opened the exhibition.


Lots of good and inspiring drawings in exhibition. I was fascinated by this picture by Marie Blake: at first glance, we thought it was a watercolour, but closer inspection revealed that it was a linocut, slowly built up from about five carefully cut blocks, printed in pale thin colours.


And some excellent work by Myrtle Pizzey (sorry, I don't have a photo), and this print by Eric Gaskell.


Again, we were deceived: the detailed, close cutting made it look like wood engraving... but it's a linocut.

I liked this print by Shenac Rogerson, of one of my favourite places, Avebury.


There's some texture on the stones (which unfortunately doesn't show on this photo) which I think was created by spattering ink onto the plate before printing it.

The exhibition continues until Saturday 15 October, 2011.

Darker green over the previous stages.



Nearly there.

A tricky gradient from dark grey to yellowish green to dark grey across the previous layer.

This new linocut starts with a gradient of grey to grey-brown. The challenge here will be keeping the registration perfect: as the layers of ink build up at each stage, the slightest misregistration will make the white lettering disappear.

The Croydon Art Society exhibition at Denbies Vineyard in Surrey starts today, and is open every day until 4pm on Sunday 18 September.


High Waving Heather
Reduction linocut • Image size 15 x 15cm • Edition of 12

Fourth and final stage. Near-black ink printed over the previous three layers.



Jeans, TShirts, Shoes. 10 x 10 cm.

This is another building that I found in the North Laines area of Brighton. The morning sun highlighted the clothes hanging in the window against the dark interior of the shop.

A difficult standing pose for our model at today's life drawing session.



Both pencil on paper, approx A3.

Red is difficult to print on top of. I printed this layer in grey (a mix of cobalt blue and burnt sienna, with white).

Red printed over the previous blue layer. The red ink (T.N. Lawrence's scarlet) is very transparent. If you add white in an attempt to increase the opacity, the red turns to pink. I adding lots (nearly 50:50) of warm yellow ink, which increased the opacity without shifting the colour.



The lamp will have darker ink printed on it later, but I didn't want the red on those parts because I was worried that the slightest misregistration would show up too much. So I used a mask to hide these parts from the red on this layer.