For those artists considering the use of charcoal as a medium in their work, do you have any advice for them? Charcoal is very versatile and wonderful for creating dramatic passages of light and dark or atmospheric images. It is wonderfully textural, and you can use it for line work or for large smudgy areas or more gestural work and although it is very forgiving - meaning you can work into it with an eraser to create light areas or build up the dark areas - it has a way of making one focus on essentials. I’d just say give it a go. How did art land up becoming your main profession? I think I just got fed up not doing what I wanted to or what I really enjoyed and once I did finally manage to focus on art practice, I realised that this was what life is about for me. I managed this through a combination of leaving a more financially comfortable life, going back to study, and importantly meeting people I could work with and learn from on a personal and professional level. In particular Joanna Jones co-director of Dover
Arts Development. In an earlier interview with us, you talked about the work the Dover Arts Development does, of which you are a co-founder. Have there been any events since we last spoke? Plenty of events - we’ve been really busy; working with young people and developing a new cultural tourism project. What kind of timeframes do you look at with regards to collagraph prints from idea to completion? I work quite spontaneously so work quite quickly at the beginning and then I sometimes just add another layer to introduce a bit of variation so that it becomes a rather spare monoprint or as I said above to add more and more layers to the point almost of destruction. I like the idea of the individual within the collective, so I rarely make print editions as such, and there always has to be variation. I work on quite thin paper so have taught myself to wet mount the paper with starch paste. This is really time-consuming so if you include drying time as well as the whole process from creating the plate to the moment when the
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