The Interview

Anne, I confess I'm fascinated by a person who studied art; is a successful working artist who exhibits regularly; raises two children, ages 4 and 8; and, by the way, edits what is arguably the world's leading printmaking magazine. How did that come about? Are you twins? Do you wake up some mornings wondering which Anne Desmet you are today? How do you find the time? Is your life frightfully structured or quite the contrary?

In autumn 1997, I was on maternity leave from London's Bankside Gallery, where I worked part-time as Print Manager (for 9 years) and also Editor of Bankside Bulletin - the erstwhile quarterly newsletter of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers and the Royal Watercolour Society - (for 4 of those 9 years). I had not long given birth to my son (Thomas, now aged 8, who has since been joined by Marion, now 4) when I received a phone call, out of the blue, from Rosemary Simmons Hon. RE - the founding editor of Printmaking Today - asking me whether I'd be interested in taking over from her as editor, as she wished to retire.

Although I did and do love writing and editing, my primary career is that of artist-printmaker and so, whilst I wanted to accept her offer, I was concerned that the job would gobble up all my time, leaving little for the production of artworks. It occurred to me that the job of editor would be viable if I had an assistant with whom I could share the workload. It just so happened that, at that time, an old friend from our student days (Mike Sims, an English graduate) had recently left a job in sales and marketing for A&C Black Ltd., book publishers, and had started to get work in freelance editing and journalism.

I asked Mike whether he might be interested in jointly editing Printmaking Today with me; he was very interested, so we put together a proposal to Rosemary and the then publisher of the magazine, Roger Farrand, offering our joint services and skills as an editorial team. We were accepted and took on the job in April 1998, when my son was about 7 months old. We are paid a modest salary for which we put in one day each week at the editorial office and take home bundles of pages for proofreading in the evenings. We also, obviously, try to get to as many exhibitions and printmaking events as we possibly can - though we never manage as many of these as we'd like. We commission many articles that appear in Printmaking Today, but a sizeable proportion also arise as unsolicited pieces submitted by e-mail - an exciting mix.

I really appreciate my day in the office - Mike is a great colleague and excellent at hunting down a good story! I like also the normality, structure and sociability of an office job - in contrast to the relative isolation of the rest of my week, working alone in my studio at my home in east London. I always feel short of time though - for the magazine, for the artwork and for my children. Sometimes it's a bit of a stressful juggling act - especially if I have an exhibition looming. But somehow, everything gets done and I seem to work well to a deadline. I am reasonably well organised. I work very intensely at the office job - but am less disciplined in my studio at home where mounds of children's washing or toys needing tidying can too easily distract me!

 

It looks as if Rome left an indelible imprint on you and your work. Would that be fair to say? How did that happen?

In 1989 I was awarded a Rome Scholarship in Printmaking, which gave me a year to work as an artist in Rome - with a travel grant to explore Italy. My initial forays into collage and my current subject matter stem directly from that experience. In Rome I first began filling sketchbooks with pencil and wash studies of streets, buildings and townscapes. Prior to that, most of my work comprised engraved portraits (though these sometimes incorporated landscape or architectural elements).

The visual impact of intense Italian sunlight on Rome's fabulously dramatic architecture - coupled with a sense of the weight of the city's history - were inspiring. I did my Fine Art degree at Oxford, England, (1983-6) amongst beautiful historic colleges, but never felt moved to engrave them. That softer, milky, English light didn't seem to inspire me.

 

Do your Tower of Babel prints owe a debt to those who have gone before: Bruegel the Elder, Abel Grimmer, etc?

Certainly. Bruegel the Elder's magnificent Tower of Babel painting of 1563 is the direct source of inspiraiton for all my Babel Tower (and the new Babel Flower) collages of the last four or five years - although I've seen and admired very many other historic Babel Tower images in the form of paintings, etchings and illuminated manuscripts.

My father was Belgian, so Bruegel's setting of the tower in the prosperous merchant town of Antwerp has particular family associations. The biblical account of the Babel Tower is very moving and relevant to the 21st century in that it evokes a sense of the intense, grandiose, timeless beauty of mankind's most ambitious constructions - the vulnerable yet aspirational qualities of towers and, by extension, the ambition and fragility of human dreams. These are the sensations I hope my own imagery conveys.

 

Our readers, many of whom are printmakers, would like to know more about your technique. How do you do it? How did your technique evolve? Where did it start, where is it headed?

I was born with a congenital hip dislocation which resulted in my having to spend about five years of my childhood (in regular lengthy stints) in hospital, having assorted surgical procedures to fix the problem. A lot of the time I was reasonably well, just lying around in bed waiting for my bones to knit - and with loads of time on my hands which I spent in making lots of pencil and black pen cartoon drawings of other children on the ward - or detailed studies of whatever was within my line of sight - the light bulb above my bed, my hands and feet, a bowl of cherries etc.

Later, when I applied to art college, my portfolio was full of such monochrome drawings and my tutor at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford, one Jean Lodge RE (an excellent Hayter-trained woodcut artist and etcher) introduced me to the techniques of wood engraving, linocut and stone lithography - all of which she rightly thought would expand my mark-making vocabulary in positive directions. After I finished at the Ruskin (and later at Central School of Art, London, where I did my postgraduate printmaking studies), I dropped the lithography due to lack of ready access to workshop facilities, but stuck with the wood engraving and linocutting, which I could carry out in my north London bedsit and print on a friend's press in south London. For 12 years, since then, I've had my own Albion press in my current home studio in east London.

I was, for a long time, satisfied in producing intensely detailed, labour-intensive editioned relief prints and artist's books, usually in black and white. It was only when I went to Rome for a year that a more random playfulness in the form of collage-making crept into my working method. My initial collages were fairly simple constructions of cut or torn fragments from proofs of my wood engravings, glued on paper. Over the years, my collage-making has become more experimental and diverse - involving fragments of my prints in a wide range of media as well as found materials: banknotes, museum tickets, biscuit wrappers, gold leaf etc.

I've also become interested in working on diverse surfaces - so recent collages are on irregularly shaped seashells, shards of roofing slate, or painted wood panels. I am increasingly occupied with diversities of scale, so one of my five, new, large, circular Babel Flower collages is nearly 40" in diameter, while another tiny collage on seashell is no bigger than a postage stamp.

 

Does being known as an editor help or hinder your artistic career? How so?

For the most part, I've found being Printmaking Today's editor helps my artistic career in that my name is perhaps familiar to certain galleries and some museum curators dealing with prints in the UK and some overseas, which is useful. It's also very stimulating, artistically, to get to see and edit so much material about other artists' work - it can inspire me with new ideas and provide useful contacts. The only downside is that, as editor, it wouldn't be appropriate for me to profile my own prints/collages in the magazine, which of course I would love to be able to do - particularly in the run up to an exhibition! When Rosemary Simmons was editor, she did feature my work in the magazine but that was back in 1994.

 

What printmakers do you admire, both ancient and contemporary? From which ones have you learned the most?

I especially admire (in no particular order) historic printmakers: Durer, Hiroshige, Lill Tschudi, Claude Flight, Piranesi, Muirhead Bone, Edward Wadsworth and Gertrude Hermes. Amongst contemporary artists, at the moment I'm impressed by the vast woodcut land and cityscapes of Emma Stibbon RE; the layered, screenprinted acrylic, semi-sculptural pieces of recent RCA graduate Marilene Oliver; and the exquisite architectural drypoints of Swedish artist Lars Nyberg - but there are many many more, too many to name here. In terms of engraving techniques, I've learnt most from Hermes and Piranesi. In terms of composition and semi-abstract use of light and dark - it would be Wadsworth.

 

Want to mention your maestro/as. You can do that here.

My particular non-printmaking influences are Giotto, Piero della Francesco, Masaccio and other luminaries of the early Italian Renaissance whose fresco and panel paintings are an endless source of awe and inspiration to me.

 

Do you think it's an advantage being from the North? (My wife's from Manchester; says it's essential!)

I don't know really. I love Liverpool, where I was born and raised and where most of my family still reside. I have a rather down-to-earth practical/pragmatic outlook, which stems from a Liverpool upbringing perhaps - although I've also inherited an overly strong work ethic but I've not yet learned to translate that into an enormous earning capacity!

I find it impossible to take seriously much of the more pseudo-intellectual 'art speak' promoted in the popular press and in many public galleries these days; I'm sure that is a Liverpudlian trait, which is utterly intolerant of pretension! Hopefully Printmaking Today is a reasonably pretension-free zone. I wish I had the knack of the brilliantly timed acerbic one-liner at which so many Liverpudlians are expert!

 

You had a retrospective of your work in a major gallery when you were 34 years old. Where do you go from here?

My retrospective exhibition, Towers and Transformations, which opened at Oxford's Ashmolean Museum in 1998 before touring seven other museums and galleries in 1999 was undoubtedly the high point of my artistic career to date, although I've since had four solo exhibitions of new work in London - including Babel Flowers currently showing at London's Hart Gallery until 1st February. I'm just now embarking on a new body of prints and collages based on the extraordinary 1903 interior of the currently derelict Victoria Baths in Manchester (winner of BBC TV's first Restoration series a few years ago). I'm hoping to exhibit these works at a significant venue in Manchester in 2008/9 and, if possible, take the exhibition to other cities.

 

Where do you see printmaking going in the near and distant futures?

Difficult to predict. My impression is that the currency of artists' prints is better understood and respected in western and eastern Europe and the USA than it is here in the UK, where the constant high-powered media marketing of reproductions tends to confuse the public as to the nature of printmaking as a creative and original art form. I think, in the UK at least, traditional printmaking in historic techniques and in limited editions will persist as a specialist activity with a particular discerning but by no means large market.

Techniques such as screenprinting and lithography will become much rarer and be largely superseded by digital technology; and I think, increasingly, where printmaking is used, amongst younger artists, it will be in a highly mixed media context - printing on unusual surfaces or printing as part of an installation or incorporated within film and video - and that the concept of the limited edition on paper will become increasingly outmoded.

 

Are you a technophile or quite the contrary?

I admire expert craftsmanship in all aspects of printmaking. However, I think there is, in UK exhibitions, a tendency to overemphasize the processes by which prints are made, rather than to focus on their subject matter or the intentions of the artist. This is a pity. Technical proficiency is of course highly desirable -- an invaluable tool in the honing of an artist's powers. Printmakers are understandably interested in developing and learning both new and old methods and we reflect this, we hope, in Printmaking Today, in the atttention we pay to techniques.

However, ultimately, I'm more interested in the message rather than the medium - give me, anytime, a characterful, lively student print, albeit a bit rough around the edges, rather than a stultifyingly lifeless, technically perfect master print. I most admire artists who, having achieved a level of technical proficiency, are then empowered and eager to experiment with what they know - technically and/or compositionally - to produce new and visually compelling images. Peter Ford RE, internationally respected printmaker and curator, is a good example of this type of artist.

 

What does printmaking need to take its "rightful place" among the visual arts? Or is that "rightful place" allegation just balderdash?

I think drawings and watercolours on paper and, even more so, printed multiples, have long been the poor relations at an art feast dominated by canvas paintings and assorted varieties of sculpture. In purely commercial terms, this may have a lot to do with the relatively perishable nature of paper rather than any particular aesthetic concerns. These days, however, now that recent generations of artists have achieved prominence with pieces in unlikely media - such as unmade beds or pickled sharks, to take two famous British examples - the boundaries of what is or isn't 'proper' art are fast receding.

I think the use of print and printing technology has already achieved mainstream acceptability in the contemporary art world, which currently seems flooded with digital/photographic/lightbox printed imagery. The subversive or commercial use of historic techniques by leading figures in the contemporary art world - such as the Chapman brothers defacing of Goya's etchings - may inadvertently and ironically benefit the current standing of etching in general. I think, ultimately, the traditional labels for types of work are disappearing in this age of mixed-media art and artists whose working methods now periodically change completely - depending on the concept they are trying to express. I think 'printmaking' as an artform may never achieve the exalted name it deserves in the visual arts - but there will be very many artists, using printmaking within a diverse and changing practice, who will.

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Anne Desmet's exhibition: Babel Flowers continues at Hart Gallery, 113 Upper Street, Islington, London N1 1QN, tel: +44 (0)20 7704 1131 until 1st February 2006. Works from the exhibition remain available for viewing on Hart Gallery's website, and can be ordered by post, phone, or e-mail, subject to availability, during and after the exhibition.