Ian Phillips works in reduction and multi-block lino and woodcuts. His prints are inspired by drawings done while walking long distance footpaths or exploring particular areas of beauty and drama.

Statement

The landscape in all its endless distractions, its textures and colours, its varying light and moods, has been my inspiration for the last thirty years and I have, as yet, felt no sign of ever tiring of its beauty. The medium I started on, and have stayed with over those same thirty years, has been the medium of relief printmaking. First with the crudest of Lino cut collage, then reduction linocuts, followed by multi block woodcut and finally working on the experimental process of Tabi Hanga. But why printmaking? Printmaking is art and craft together, it’s mixing colours and playing with sharp tools, it’s traditional and modern, A processes with technical limitations that somehow allows an boundless flexibility. Frustrating and fabulous, it gifts you an absorbing task to lose oneself in completely, but it’s a task you’ll never master completely. So there is always more excitement to discover.

I have been working with print for thirty five years now. What started as a mild interest during my Illustration degree gradually developed into an all consuming obsession. Inspired by the sublime Japanese woodblock prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige I taught myself how to print reduction linocuts. I admired the delicate sensibilities of those Ukiyo-e artists, and their ability to capture the beauty of their seasons, the variety of the weather and the richness of their landscape and wanted to transfer those across to my own world and the beautiful things I saw every day. Over the years I have continued this process of assimilating all the different and amazing experiences I have had into my print practice.Whether this was learning all about pattern and spontaneity from the indigenous artists at the Djumbunji Print Workshop in Cairns, Australia or producing large, seascape woodcuts with the Pine Feroda Collective in Devon or studying the water woodcut method with Professor Wang Cho at the Purple Bamboo studio in Hangzhou, China. All these process’ have contributed essential elements to the way I now work.

My working process starts with a long walk in an empty landscape and my sketchbook. I’m not looking for colour, pattern, texture, movement and the way light will alter and play with all of these elements, I’m just walking and feeling at home. Eventually, though, I find the right place to stand, the right direction to look and everything I want will be just there, waiting for me, as a complete and finished composition. Then I just draw. Once drawn, it’s back to the studio to scale the image up, transfer onto the block, maybe with a brush and ink, cut, proof, cut, print, proof some more and finally edition. They may begin as a simple scribble in a sketchbook but my prints are all about cutting marks and playing with tone and colour through the inking. The combination of which should create the texture of the rocks I scrambled up, the shape of those clouds above me or the way the light fell across that breaking wave and lit up the cliff. A personal record of my time walking in the landscape.