A Year in a Meadow in Linocuts

Posted on November 15, 2022 by hestercoxprintmaker

I’ve been beavering away on my meadow project and it’s time for a bit of an update. When I undertook my project with the Dales Countryside Museum back in 2019, I had always intended to create a series of linocuts as a homage to Marie Hartley’s gorgeous wood engravings but, as is often the case, I ran out of time and ended up sticking to collagraph. With this new opportunity to show my project at the museum I’ve been given another chance to achieve this goal. I decided that I will create 12 black and white linocuts that will illustrate life in a meadow over a calendar year. I have been taking note of everything that happens in our local meadows for the last eight years and have a wealth of photos, drawings and ideas. My neighbour that farms these meadows follows the traditional methods which means that she intermittantly grazes the meadows with a flock of ewes from September keeping the grass low enough to allow meadow plant seeds to germinate. In late October/November she introduces a tup to the ewes and he swaggers about the fields looking macho in his harness (it’s usually a texel and a friend rightly likened him to a nightclub bouncer). Then the ewes are back in with their lambs from early March through to the end of April. The fields receive a bit of farm ‘muck’ for fertilising at some point and then from May through to August, the meadows are empty of livestock and it is fantastic to see the speed at which the plants grow and the different species that are dominant at different times. The hay gets cut around mid-July and this year we were fortunate to witness the successful fledging of four curlew chicks.

Marie Hartley’s wood engravings show some of the stages in the haymaking methods of the 1930s & 40s and my aim is to show contemporary methods with my images. I’m not an adept wood engraver (maybe one day!) but I am pretty competent at linocut, having done it on and off since I left college, and the look of it and way of working share some similarities with wood engraving. They are both relief print methods and so you are printing the raised surface of the block. The image is created by the removal of that surface with sharp tools. In effect, you are creating white areas that don’t print plus the block is a mirror image of the final print so it does require a bit of brain power to design in that way. I sometimes think that printmakers have very specific kind of brains in order not to feel befuddled all of the time!

In the above images, you can see the linoleum (made from a mix of linseed oil, cork dust, resin and gum pressed onto a jute backing). It is normally grey but I’ve stained the surface with printing ink so that it is easier to see the cuts that I’ve made. I also use a white gel pen to draw on some more complicated areas so that I don’t make mistakes when cutting. You can’t easily put back what you’ve cut away so it is important to keep track of what you’re doing.

I’ve taken some time to look at the work of other artists known for wood engraving and linocut and the research has been really enjoyable. Having printed all of Marie Hartley’s blocks, I’m very familiar with her work but I also looked at the engravings of artists such as Charles Tunnicliffe, Clare Leighton, Howard Phipps & Clifford Webb. It is interesting to see how they handle different skies, how much detail they choose to put in and what kind of stylisation they employ. I’ve chosen to keep mine quite illustrational and very much about a specific place so you’ll see Penyghent cropping up in a few. Here’s the first proofs for May & June, I may ‘tweak’ them a bit before I edition them next year:

The photos are of proof prints in my sketch book so I apologise for the quality of the images!

I’m also making a series of smaller square linocuts that will depict some of the diverse wildlife species that rely on the meadows, and the plants/trees growing on the fringes, for their food and shelter. There is a delicate balance at work with certain insects only eating specific plants and then birds and animals relying on feeding from the seeds of certain plants or eating the insects of the meadows and further up the chain you have birds such as barn owls looking for the shrews and voles that live in and on the edges of the meadows and birds such as curlews relying on sheltered places to nest and raise their chicks. I hope that this print series will help to communicate the ecological importance of these traditional meadows.

Marie’s List

Posted on June 29, 2020 by hestercoxprintmaker

As lockdown restrictions have eased, I’ve been able to revisit a few of the sites for my project and have enjoyed getting back to Keld, Muker, Birkdale and Semerwater. It has been interesting to see how the whole situation with Covid has impacted my work for the project. With the exception of teaching workshops, gallery deliveries, art fairs and exhibitions, I mainly work from home in my studio. As my work calendar quickly went from full to totally empty I found myself with plenty of time to myself and few distractions from other projects. At times, making new prints for my exhibition has been a struggle but at others, it has been a solace – something to become absorbed in allowing me to forget what was happening in the wider world. What I have noticed is that my focus shifted from making landscape pieces or larger single prints to much smaller work inspired by words and details.

As for many people, nature has become an even bigger inspiration during this time. The birds becoming active and migrants returning as spring arrived became of huge interest to me as I went out for my daily exercise. The songs seemed louder and the species more varied. I saw linnets in the lane, curlews in the field, oystercatchers nesting by the road, ring ouzels right next to the footpath on Penyghent and, with the absence of traffic and people, they all seemed bolder and more at ease. Meeting a local farmer on one of my walks, we stood across the lane from each other and discussed how we felt that the Yorkshire Dales was probably as quiet as it would have been a hundred years ago. I began listing all of the birds that I’d seen within my local area and I compared that with a list that I’d found in Marie Hartley’s diary (from 1943-47).

I’d already noticed the appearance of the corncrake on that list, a bird no longer seen in the Yorkshire Dales, and I started to make a note of all the birds on both our lists that have been classed as ‘birds of conservation concern’ by the BTO (British Trust for Ornithology) & RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds). “The assessment is based on the most up-to-date evidence available and criteria include conservation status at global and European levels and, within the UK: historical decline, trends in population and range, rarity, localised distribution and international importance” (BTO). The ‘Red List’ currently has 67 species of birds found in the UK that have been assessed as being at risk. Marie’s list of 66 birds includes: 1 that is now completely absent from the Yorkshire Dales, 14 that are on the red list, 23 on the amber list and only 28 are classed as being ‘green status’ in that they are plentiful and breeding well within the UK. I have a list of 68 species that I’ve seen and have been able to positively identify within the Yorkshire Three Peaks region. I can only guess at how much more abundant many of the species were in the early 1940s, a time just before agriculture was about to undergo major changes in intensification and mechanisation.

Wood engraving by Marie Hartley showing haymaking in the Yorkshire Dales.

I’m not an ornithologist and everything I know about birds has been learned from my mum (a retired ecologist) and my own research but I find the subject fascinating: worrying but also inspiring. On the one hand, it is of great concern that there are so many bird species now in decline but on the other hand, heartening to know that the Yorkshire Dales is home to so many of them. I decided to make a piece of work taking Marie’s List as a starting point. I wanted it to celebrate what we have in the Yorkshire Dales and also perhaps provoke discussion and interest in bird conservation and the reasons why so many birds are in decline.

As with all of my work, I started with an idea and that developed and changed as I made various decisions about what to include, where to focus and how to physically create the work. I selected 14 birds from Marie’s list that were either red or amber status. I decided to create an individual printing plate for each with her actual list reproduced in the middle. As I started to work out the overall design, I thought about whether I’d label the birds or not and once I decided that I would, I realised that the plates were starting to resemble the old cigarette cards that people used to collect. I have a few John Players ‘Bird of the British Isles’ cards and I love the size and detail of them. I made each little collagraph card using cutting techniques combined with gesso, acrylic medium & wood glue for texture. The labels were made by reversing text on my computer, printing it out, varnishing it and scratching the letters out to create areas of drypoint. I used a font that resembled letterpress type from the 40s.

Proof prints of some of the bird collagraphs with curlew and oystercatcher feathers that I found on a run.

I also like the link between these and the tiny wood engravings of individual birds that Marie created as end pieces for chapters in the Dales books. In fact I included three of the birds she depicted: Dipper, Curlew and Snipe.

Dipper, wood engraving by Marie Hartley

Snipe, wood engraving by Marie Hartley

Curlew, wood engraving by Marie Hartley

Dipper collagraph, Hester Cox

Snipe collagraph, Hester Cox

Curlew collagraph, Hester Cox

I wanted to recreate Marie’s handwriting so that the list would look as she’d written it. Normally I would use a photograph of the list and take it to a printmaking studio where I could use specialist equipment to make a printing plate such as a silkscreen or a photopolymer plate. This could then be combined with my collagraph cards to create the overall work. Unfortunately, during lockdown all the studios were closed and I wouldn’t have been able to justify travelling to them anyway (there are none that are within an hours drive). I considered ordering a photopolymer printing plate from a company but was put off by the expense and the lack of control over the quality. So I decided to go down the route of creating a drypoint using a reversed photographic printout from one of my photos of the page of Marie’s diary. It is a laborious way of working but very effective and probably exactly the thing to be doing when you feel out of sorts with the world around you. It took me two and half days to scratch out all of the letters but at the end of that, I had an intaglio printing plate that I could use alongside my little bird collagraphs.

Now to the printing part. I’d been ‘proofing’ each bird plate as I went along in order to check whether they worked and also because the pattern of light and dark backgrounds was quite important to the overall look of the print. I spent a great deal of time arranging and rearranging the cards to make the overall design aesthetically pleasing. Once I had proofed everything, it was time to make a ‘registration paper’ so that the spacing of the individual plates would be perfect every time I printed. It’s pretty straightforward, you mark on a piece of paper where each plate will go and draw out the rectangles. I then taped that to my press bed with a clean piece of tissue paper over the top. I could see the lines through the tissue but could take it off when it got dirty. The first print went quite well but after that, each time I laid the damp paper over the top the plates kept moving so that I’d end up with a wonky prints. To ink and wipe all of the plates for one print took up to 2 hours so after the second crooked print, I gave up and decided to work on the solution to the moving plates before I had another go.

I needed something to hold them in place that wouldn’t damage the plates and also wouldn’t create a ‘hotspot’ of added depth because that would make that area of the print darker due to extra pressure. Brian (my husband) suggested that I stick them to the tissue with smears of honey. Whilst I initially thought this would be really messy and unlikely to work, it did lead me to realise that I could try a small dab of bookbinder’s pva in place of the honey. It is a glue that is archival but that can also can be removed with water after it has dried. I put a tiny dab on the back of each plate which held it in place and then, after printing, I was able to wash the glue and tissue from the back of them without causing any damage to the plates. This is a bit of a revelation because I like using lots of plates to create a single image but the movement issue has often put me off.

So after a few weeks of work, the print is finished and ready to frame for whenever the exhibition goes ahead. We are now waiting to find out when the museum will reopen and what would be the best course of action regarding the dates for the show. I will let everyone know as soon as we have a definite decision.

Meadow Collection

Posted on May 7, 2020 by hestercoxprintmaker

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One of the pieces that I’ve made for my exhibition, ‘The View From the Fells: In the Footsteps of Marie Hartley’, is a continuation of a passion of mine that began a few years ago. Upland meadows are a wonderful feature of the Yorkshire Dales and people travel miles to see them during the months of late May and June and haymaking (or ‘haytime’ as it is known around here) is something that Ella Pontefract and Marie Hartley talked about a lot in their books. I have written a post all about the meadows at Muker HERE Unfortunately, across the country we have lost the majority of our haymeadows due to changes and intensification in agriculture but many landowners, farmers and conservationists are now working together to try to protect and conserve those that remain having recognised the ecological, cultural, agricultural and aesthetic value of them. I’ve been fortunate to live close to a pair of meadows that I have been observing for six years now and the incredible diversity of plant species, and the insects and birds that feed on them, continues to surprise and delight me.

In 2017 I created a large-scale print installation in a field barn which celebrated our upland hay meadows (see my blog post HERE). For my exhibition at the Dales Countryside Museum, I have gone to the other extreme and created a series of 95 miniature printing plates that form one larger piece. I wanted to reflect the colours and the myriad of plants and insects that can be found in just a small area of a traditional hay meadow. I have also been fascinated by the fact that Marie Hartley worked on such a small scale to create the wood engravings that illustrated the three Dales books and I wanted to try working on a similar scale myself. Going from 4 metre long printed hangings to tiny plates of often no more than 2.4 x 4cm was a challenge but also really enjoyable.

My meadow collection has been a long time in the making. I began the work last year when the hay meadows were in full flower. I spent time sketching the different grasses and flowers in preparation for making the plates. It became obvious that the piece would be something of a labour of love and I was tied up with other work last year so I put it to one side until January when I knew I’d have six months to work almost exclusively on the final work for the exhibition. The finished piece is created within an old print type drawer of the kind that you often see in junk and second hand shops. I’ve used smaller ones before in my Collections project and I like the way they give the pieces a museum quality with each print becoming an artefact within each space. I also thought that each individual print shown in a section of the tray would give the whole piece a feeling of a cross section of a meadow and there was a connection with Marie Hartley and her wood engraving blocks and the original books being created using letterpress.

I coded all the sections of the tray and then drew out rectangles in my sketchbook that related to each section. My aim was to try to depict all the plants that are typical of a healthy upland meadow and I also included a number of invertebrate species such as bees, moths, butterflies and beetles. These are attracted to the different species and in turn become food for birds and animals and so the whole habitat becomes a vital ecosystem. I set about making every drawing into a small cardboard collagraph plate using cutting and painting techniques. It was very fiddly and has made me realise how much my eyesight has deteriorated in my forties. Fortunately, I found that without my contact lenses I could see really well close up so I worked like that most of the time and then blundered round my studio looking for my glasses whenever I needed to see beyond my nose!

At the end of February I went to Ålgården Studios in Sweden for a fortnight of intensive work and I made sure that I finished making all of the meadow plates before I left. It had turned into almost a month’s work and I was paranoid about the plates getting damaged or lost so I stored them all in a wooden box in our house. I returned on 12th March just as COVID-19 was getting serious and printing the plates was the first thing that I did as we went into lock down. This situation has tested everyone and everyone’s experience of it will be different but I know I’m not alone in having gone through a period of anxiety, lack of motivation and difficulty in concentrating. Creativity is a strange beast and I find that I need very specific circumstances for me to feel inspired and motivated to make things and so I was very happy to have a box of 95 small plates to print. It was something that needed doing in order to complete the piece but all of the thinking and creative part had pretty much been done and now I just had to go through the time consuming practical part of inking, wiping and printing each one. I spent the next week and half doing just that whilst listening to audio books (thank you Ann Cleeves!) and podcasts. Do listen to ‘The Poet Laureate has gone to his Shed’ if you want to hear some excellent conversations between Simon Armitage and various creative people. (NB. I was once part of a group of fellrunners who helped Simon find his way off of Cross Fell and arranged for him to give a poetry reading in Dufton. He gave me his Mars bar…I’ve eaten it!).

Each printing plate is inked and wiped à la poupée which meant that I first inked them in sepia and then I wiped back the plant part of the plate with cotton buds and carefully applied the colours before then very carefully wiping again so that the colour was just a hint. The paper I printed onto was dampened and blotted so it was nice and soft and I printed groups up together with plenty of space for cutting to size. I used my etching press in order to get enough pressure to push the paper into all the details of each plate.

The prints were then left to dry. Using my dad’s old workmate and a table saw, I measured and cut a small block of MDF to fit each section of the tray. I’m notoriously accident prone and so it was slightly scary cutting with a spinning blade but I soon got the hang of it (with safety glasses and big gloves) and when all the blocks were cut, I painted the surface with gesso and then glued the prints in place using bookbinders glue so that they would be archival and last for many years. I then waxed the surface of each print with an acrylic wax to protect them before fitting them into place. The finished result was exactly what I was hoping for and I am pretty happy with it. Due to the huge amount of work involved, I’ve decided that I need to make it a small edition of ten in order to make it cost effective and so that I can keep one for future shows. I will make up two trays and then the others will be made to order. I’m now back to making more conventional collagraph prints for the exhibition and will talk more about some of those in a future post.

Carrying on!

Posted on April 27, 2020 by hestercoxprintmaker

Well, so much has changed since I last posted and the world feels like a very different place. I’ve decided not to write too much about the current situation with COVID-19 because I think we all need a bit of escape from the constant bombardment and I doubt that my ‘two penneth’ will help. There’s some wonderful writers and philosophers out there that will have plenty to say and do it in a far more profound way so I’ll just say that I hope that people stay safe, well and can remain positive.

I’m currently in the ‘making’ stage of my project with the Dales Countryside Museum and I’m working on a series of prints which have been inspired by areas of the Dales that Marie Hartley and Ella Pontefract wrote about in their three books: ‘Swaledale’, ‘Wensleydale’ & ‘Wharfedale’. Fortunately, I have already spent over a year visiting a few areas repeatedly and have collected plenty of reference material so, despite being confined to my immediate area (no hardship, it is a beautiful part of the Yorkshire Dales), I am able to continue to work on the show. My husband is also working from home and our dogs are delighted to have us around all day! It isn’t always easy to concentrate, stay motivated and get into the right headspace when there is something so much bigger than all of us happening and we are preoccupied by thoughts of our family and friends. For my own sanity and the benefit of my work, I’m avoiding the radio, spending much less time on social media and am immersing myself in audio books (I am currently working through Ann Cleeves’ ‘Inspector Vera Stanhope’ series).

What has struck me the most about my immediate environment is the change in the countryside. The landscape is normally full of walkers, cyclists and runners tackling one or all three of the Yorkshire Three Peaks and now the hills are virtually empty of people. Brian and I are both fellrunners and our daily exercise takes the form of a run with the dogs and we can go for miles without seeing a single person except perhaps a farmer on a quad bike. It would be tempting to wax lyrical about the peace and quiet except that the hills are ringing with the bleating of lambs and the most exceptional bird song. There are pairs of curlews poking about in the earth, hares running around and I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many meadow pipits, skylarks and wheatears. I’ve even seen ring ouzels on Penyghent a few times. I was talking to a neighbour who has farmed here for many years and he said that this is how it used to be when he was young which makes me wonder if this is what it was also like when Marie and Ella were researching their books (minus the quad bikes!).

Before everywhere went into ‘lock down’, I went to Ålgården studios in Sweden to spend a couple weeks working intensively on the project. I took large pieces of card to Sweden thinking that I’d create some big collagraph prints and what I ended up making were four panoramic pieces each formed from seven smaller images that illustrate ‘journeys’ that I’ve taken. In fact, at the end of the fortnight, all of the printing plates could be wrapped up carefully and put in my pocket!

I’m working on various scales for the exhibition but I really like this link with Marie Hartley’s illustrations. Her wood engravings were small, intricate little blocks and appeared throughout the books illustrating the places, people and wildlife that Ella wrote about. Each of my ‘Waymark’ prints tells the story of a particular time that I ran a route inspired by their writing. Two of the pieces actually include quotes from the relevant books. Here is ‘Waymarks: Kisdon’:

and ‘Waymarks: Birkdale’:

The images are inspired by things that I’ve seen along the routes and that help to tell the story and indicate the seasons. There are currently two more in the series and I’m now working on a fifth that is specifically about the stretch of the river Swale from Muker to Keld.

I travelled back on my birthday, 12th March, after which we quickly went into a very different existence. Before I went away, I’d spent weeks working on another piece which consists of 95 tiny prints collected together to form a larger work. The plates were sat in a box in my studio waiting to be printed and that proved to be the perfect project to tackle whilst coming to terms with our new circumstances. My next post will be all about that piece. Thanks for reading and I hope everyone can find some positives to keep them going.

Bird Life in the Dales

Posted on June 27, 2019 by hestercoxprintmaker

I’ve just been to the Dales Countryside Museum for the ‘big handover’ of all of the prints that I’ve taken from Marie Hartley’s wood engraving blocks. There are two sets of 129 prints made from 127 blocks (2 were double-sided!). I had to leave the linocuts unprinted because they’d degraded over time and become hard, cracked and warped. I didn’t want to damage them further and, although I tentatively tried to print one block, I wouldn’t have been able to get a decent print from them. I’m really happy to have played a part in this important archive and to help realise one of Fiona Rosher’s dreams for the museum. I then spent a couple hours reading some of Marie’s diaries that she wrote when she was working and living with Ella Pontefract and then Joan Ingilby.

The diaries often contain illustrations, poetry, natural objects, christmas cards & other ephemera.

I have just read the heart-breaking entries from the time of Ella’s death and the year anniversary of it. I will write a little more about the women’s lives and the important part that Joan’s friendship played in helping Marie to recover in another post. The diaries that I have just been reading were written before, during and after the second world war and provide a fascinating insight into how it affected the people living in the Dales.

An entry from 1950 which included petrol rationing tokens.

I’m currently visiting different areas of the Dales (written about in Marie’s books) with a view to collecting ideas for new work and I’m taking photos and making notes of what I see. I’ve got various lists of all the wildlife that I’ve been seeing and I was delighted to find numerous entries in Marie’s diaries that record the birds that she saw each year.

I think that one of the most poignant things is the fact that she refers to seeing corncrakes near Askrigg and these have now vanished from the Yorkshire Dales. I’ve been out and about and seen some really amazing wildlife. Here are some collages of photos taken on my visits to Muker, Keld, Penyghent, Plover Hill and Semerwater.

Top L-R: lamb on Kisdon, eggshell at Snaizeholme, Lapwing above Stalling Busk. Middle L-R: Red squirrel at Snaizeholme, Curlew, fox cub. Bottom L-R: pied wagtail at Malham, me on Kisdon!, sheep on Kisdon.

Top L-R: primroses on Kisdon, cloudberry on Plover Hill, Birds Eye Primrose near Yockenthwaite. Middle L-R: Saxifrage on Plover Hill, Bluebells on Kisdon, Mountain primrose on Penyghent. Bottom L-R: cotton grass on Plover Hill, Purple Saxifrage on Penyghent, meadows at Muker

Top L-R: Oyster catcher at Keld, Wheatear at Muker, Ring Ouzel near Plover Hill. Middle L-R: Sandpiper at Kisdon Force, Lapwing above Stalling Busk, sported flycatcher at Muker. Bottom L-R: Meadow Pipit on Penyghent, canada geese with goslings on Semerwater, grey wagtail at Kisdon Force.

I often run my routes because it means that I can go further and to places that I wouldn’t get to when walking. I don’t mind getting wet in bogs or scrambling through heather when I’m in my running shoes and I also find that I see far more wildlife and the animals and birds seem less bothered by me. I often spot things and hide out of sight so I can watch without disturbing. For me, these times are some of the most joyful in life. I gain a clarity of thought and I often solve solutions to my printmaking conundrums as I’m running up a hill or across an open moor. Running can be meditative and it is the perfect counterpoint to my sedentary days in the studio.

A golden plover seen near the cairn at the summit of Kisdon yesterday.

I carry a small Canon Powershot camera that fits in my hand or a bumbag and I chose one with a powerful zoom lens. I’m really enjoying sketching from life for this project and am looking forward to doing more landscape studies ‘in the field’ but it is virtually impossible for me to draw fleeting encounters with birds and animals and so I have always spent time watching to get to know them and then used my huge reference library of photos to help me get accurate details in my prints. The rest is then left to my imagination, my memory of landscape and artistic licence! I have enormous respect for the likes of Robert Gillmor who has spent a lifetime studying and drawing birds from life in order to make his exquisite prints.

Top: Studies from life of grasses and meadow plants which were made to understand the structure for when I am cutting my collagraph prints. Below: lapwing studies made from my photographs to help me understand how they fly so that I can make prints that capture the essence of their behaviour.

Marie, Ella and Joan spent their lifetimes getting to know the Yorkshire Dales and their books are as much about the people living there as of the land itself. Marie’s diaries have many entries about time spent with fascinating people learning about life and traditions in the Yorkshire Dales. Whilst I’m not aiming to write a book about the people of the Dales, I do hope that the artwork I make will show how the landscape has been shaped and moulded by the farming, mining and other human interactions with the land and how, in many cases, that has made incredible habitats for wildlife to thrive. As a result of this project, I’ve already met some really interesting farmers and landowners who have made conservation a priority in their work and I hope that will be reflected in some of my prints.

Meadows at Muker

Posted on June 25, 2019 by hestercoxprintmaker

For anyone that is new to my blog, I’m currently working on a project with the Dales Countryside Museum. I’ve been printing up their archive of Marie Hartley MBE’s wood engraving blocks that were used to illustrate her books about Swaledale, Wensleydale and Wharfedale written with Ella Pontefract. I’m now in the next phase of the project which is to carry out research in the form of looking at the archive of her notebooks, diaries and sketchbooks and going out ‘into the field’ to get inspiration for a new body of my own work to be exhibited at the museum gallery in 2020.

Today I’ve been sketching meadow grasses and flowers for reference for new prints inspired by the glorious upland meadows (of which the Yorkshire Dales National Park has a few). In the 1930s, Marie and Ella wrote about ‘haytime’ in the dales, of a time when whole communities were involved in the cutting and collecting of the hay, machinery was pulled by horses and the hay was then stored in the famous stone barns (often known as cow’us or laithe) ready for feeding the overwintering cattle and sheep.

(A selection of Marie Hartley’s wood engravings depicting aspects of hay making)

“When hay-time comes, generally towards the middle of July, everything else is put aside. All the women help, extra daughters appear miraculously from service. Irishmen are sometimes employed by farmers with small families. In a very wet summer much of the hay has to be left to rot in the fields, and some of the grass is never cut. When hay-time is well and safely over, a wave of relief goes through the upper dale”. (from Swaledale, 1934)

The meadows were not only fragrant, extremely beautiful and a rich source of food they were also very important ecosystems supporting a wide variety of invertebrates which were then fed on by numerous birds and animals. Unfortunately, as agricultural practises have changed and intensified, over the last fifty years 98% of meadows in the UK have been destroyed.

The Yorkshire Dales have also lost a proportion of their traditional meadows but, fortunately, due to the work of the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority (YDNPA), Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust (YDMT) and Natural England alongside committed farmers and landowners, the last twenty or so years has seen the conservation and restoration of species-rich meadows. This is a subject that I’ve been interested in since moving to the Yorkshire Dales and further information can be found at the websites of the YDMT & YDNPA. Times are very different now and ecology and economics mean that we’re unlikely to go back to the days of meadow-strewn Dales but what is being created is a network of species-rich meadows that everyone can benefit from and that are being managed with the help of modern machinery alleviating some of the hardships that the farming community of Marie’s time would have suffered. They are not only useful as a fodder crop of animals but attractive to wildlife, the local community and a visitor attraction which helps the local economy.

Due to Ella and Marie’s obvious love of the area, I’ve been visiting and revisiting locations around Kisdon fell (I am a fellrunner after all) which include Muker, Thwaite, Angram and Keld. The meadows at Muker, which have been given Coronation status, are currently at their most stunning.

This is the perfect time to visit. They are colourful and smell amazing, swallows and swifts swoop over them to feed on the many insects that they attract and there are so many different plant species. You can see yellow rattle, pignut, red clover, wood crane’s bill, eyebright, rough hawkbit, cat’s ear, meadow buttercups, lady’s mantle, crosswort, speedwell and melancholy thistle to name but a few!

“In this grave sweet valley of the Swale meadows like the flowery meads of medieval paintings burgeon in early summer. Perhaps nowhere else in the dale does the yellow of buttercups splash the fields more boldly, or the pink of crane’s-bill tinge them more deeply, or wayside bushes shower sprays of pink and white roses more freely than here round Gunnerside and Muker” so says Joan Ingilby and Marie Hartley in their book, The Yorkshire Dales, 1956.

Printing Marie’s Wood Engravings

Posted on April 10, 2019 by hestercoxprintmaker

I’ll be writing a bit more about Marie Hartley MBE, her life and work in a future post but in the meantime, I’ve been busily making prints from her exquisite wood engraving blocks to create an archive for the Dales Countryside Museum. For those that are not familiar with wood engraving, it is a form of relief printing in the same family as linocut and woodcut. The principle is pretty simple, parts of the surface of the block are removed with special tools and what is left behind (the raised or relief surface) has ink applied to it and that ink is transferred to paper using pressure which can be from a press or from a hand tool such as a wooden spoon or print baren. Wood engraving differs from wood cut in that the endgrain of slow growing wood is used instead of the longitudinal plank of the wood. The wood is highly polished to create a very smooth surface and fine metal tools, with wonderful names such as ‘spitsticker’, ‘scorper’ & ‘tint tool’, are used to scrape away tiny amounts of the wood surface to create the design. The surface area that is scraped/cut away won’t print and will form the white parts of the design. The design also prints as a mirror-image so it is important to reverse sketches on the block first to avoid a ‘back-to-front’ print. Wood engravers often use a leather sand bag for resting the wood on as this enables them to tilt and turn the block whilst cutting. I think Marie Hartley must have used a magnifier for at least some of her designs as one block that I printed had the word ‘Ingleton’ written in reverse on a finger post and the letters could not have been more than 2mm high!! She created the wood engravings for the three Dales books in the 1930s when she herself would have been in her late twenties and early thirties. I don’t know what her eyesight was like but mine certainly wouldn’t be good enough to do that kind of work without help from a magnifier!

The best wood for this kind of printmaking is generally regarded to be Box wood, Buxus Sempervirens, but there are other woods in frequent use such as cherry, apple, holly & Lemonwood (which is not actually from the lemon tree but gets its name from the citrus smell that emanates from it when it is first cut). Larger blocks are often created by bonding smaller pieces of wood together. Care should be taken of the blocks so that they don’t get damp or too hot as this can warp them and bonded blocks can part company with each other. I’ve printed a few of Marie’s blocks which have acquired damage over the years and a few need a bit of restoration in order to get a flawless print but the Dales Countryside Museum have done a good job of storing them on their sides and keeping them in good condition. To think that some of them are almost 90 years old and yet still producing perfect prints is amazing. Each of Marie’s blocks has been given an accession number and has been catalogued to include any extra information such as if/where/when it was published.

I had always believed that the wooden blocks were used for printing the books and would have been clamped in with the letterpress type but on reading ‘Yorkshire Heritage’ (Marie’s memoir to Ella Pontefract) she talks about ‘electros’ being made of the blocks for printing purposes. Electrotyping is a process invented in the mid-1800s and there is a good description of it here. This process was developed to protect the master blocks as publishers would require literally thousands of prints to be made and the wood was vulnerable to damage. A metal printing block is made from a mould of the original wood engraving and it has all of the fine detail and is a perfect replica of the artist’s work. In this way, the original blocks could be retained as ‘masters’ and protected for future use.

To print the blocks, I have been using a lightweight and very smooth paper called Zerkall Extra Smooth which I have bought from John Purcell Paper. I tested lots of papers before selecting this one. There are so many different papers suitable for hand printing, including some beautiful lightweight Japanese ones, but I was looking for something that would be relatively robust for use in the museum and that would give the crispest details in case the museum decide to reproduce the prints at any stage. I am printing all of the blocks by hand and not on a press. This allows me to do the printing in the museum so that people can watch the process and it also allows me more flexibility because I can alter the pressure across the block to compensate for any small dents that have occurred over the years. I use a carbon black letterpress ink from Lawrence Art Supplies. It is a linseed-oil based ink and I am cleaning with a soft rag and Zest-It so that the blocks are ink-free after use but there are also no harmful fumes in the museum. You could use vegetable oil but it can leave a sticky residue. White spirit is awful stuff!

To apply pressure I am using two beautiful tools. The first is a burnisher made by Chris Daunt, a supplier of materials for wood engraving and a wood engraver himself, it is made from yew and has a piece of horn on the end. It is perfect for the tiny blocks. The second is a baren made by my step-dad who is a wood turner. I was bemoaning the fact that despite all the barens available, I find a wooden spoon to be the best tool for printing linocuts and he said he’d have a go at making me a wooden baren. Not only is it a beautiful object in its own right but it sits perfectly in the palm of your hand and is comfortable to use. Mine is made from laburnum wood which came from my sister’s garden. The prints have been perfect. He is now selling them via his etsy shop! Here are a couple photos of him making a baren for a customer.

Using the burnisher and baren, I carefully rub over the back of the paper in a circular motion taking care to cover the entire block. It is a bit of an art in itself and takes lots of practise to get just the right amount of ink and even pressure so that all of the detail prints perfectly. I’m using a cutting board as a registration board so that I can position the blocks centrally on the paper. They all vary in size and this way I can avoid making lots and lots of registration papers. I just count the squares, simple! I also use some uncut blocks placed around the inked block and these help when I lower the paper onto the wood engraving. They prevent the paper flopping about and the image smudging. It has been a steep learning curve but I now have a good rhythm going and not many ‘rejects’. I’ve also learned the hard way that I need to write the accession number of the block on the back of the paper before printing so that when I come to file the prints the following week, I know which blocks they come from! It is amazing how a small pack horse bridge can look very similar to ten other bridges when you are trying to identify it. Fortunately I also have all of Marie’s books so I can cross-reference them too!

So that is the process and I have four more public printing sessions to do. They are from 12-4pm on Sunday 14th April, Tuesdays 23rd & 30th April and, finally, Tuesday 7th May. Museum admission charges apply but you can come and see me print as part of that. The museum is a gem and well worth the entry fee. If I don’t get all of the blocks printed in the remaining sessions, I may well add an extra date and I’ll be sure to publicise it if I do.

In the Footsteps of Marie Hartley MBE

Posted on March 27, 2019 by hestercoxprintmaker

Back at the beginning of 2018 I was contacted by Fiona Rosher, Museum Manager at the Dales Countryside Museum in Hawes. The Museum was celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the book ‘Life and Tradition in the Yorkshire Dales’ which was written and illustrated by Marie Hartley and Joan Ingilby who founded the Museum. Within their archives was a collection of 130 wood engraving blocks created by Marie Hartley MBE and Fiona wanted to know if I would be interested in printing them so that they could have a set of prints for use within the museum. This sounded intriguing and what followed was a series of meetings with Fiona where we discussed the possibilities of the project. It soon expanded and developed into one that would culminate in an exhibition of my own work in the summer of 2020. We agreed that I would begin the project by printing the blocks in the museum so that visitors could watch and I could talk to them about their memories of Marie, their experience of the Yorkshire Dales and about printmaking. I would then carry out research about Marie Hartley which would take the form of reading all of her books written in collaboration with Ella Pontefract and Joan Ingleby and I would be given access to the archive of sketchbooks, notebooks and diaries that the museum owned. This would help to form a picture of the woman herself and help me to find an angle for my own work. I would then go out ‘into the field’ to draw, print and develop ideas for a series of brand new works. In other words, a dream of a job!

Anyone that knows me will know that I work very hard to make a full-time living as an artist and I am often so embroiled in various exhibitions, shows, teaching workshops, running art groups and the accompanying admin that’s involved in doing those things that I often feel that there is very little time and headspace for making new work. It is one of the reasons that I disappear off to Ålgården Studios for a few weeks every year so that I can have uninterrupted time to develop my printmaking. With that in mind, we realised that I’d need some funding to allow me to take a bit of a step back from other commitments for a while and really make the most of this opportunity. Fiona was brilliant in campaigning for the project and we are so fortunate that the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority and the Friends of the Dales Countryside Museum have provided the necessary support needed. In return, I am printing the blocks within the museum to allow the public to see the process, will be giving a talk to the FoDCM and will be running a number of printmaking workshops at the museum in 2020. I’m also updating the archive records for the wood engravings as I progress through the printing, making notes of any damage and any links to preparatory drawings that I discover in Marie’s sketchbooks.

Most of the wood engravings that have been published were created for three books that Marie wrote with Ella Pontefract: Wensleydale, Swaledale & Wharfedale. I’ve decided that I will concentrate my own research on those areas of the Yorkshire Dales. I’m a keen fellrunner and my plan is to run some of the routes described in these books, get to know the places and then I will identify particular points of interest that I would like to return to for sketching and printing. I’ve got a tentative plan to take my campervan on some of my excursions and set up my portable press so I can actually print directly in the landscape. I like to feel that it would be in keeping with Marie and Ella’s explorations of Wensleydale carried out in their little caravan that they christened ‘The Green Plover’ (see a sketch of Marie’s now held at the Leeds University Art Collections by clicking here)

I shall be writing regularly about the project and sharing snippets of research, images printed, anecdotes from the people that I meet and anything else that I find interesting. In the mean time, if you would like to see me printing some of the wood engravings, I will be at the Dales Countryside Museum in Hawes from 12-4pm on consecutive Tuesdays up to and including the 7th May 2019 (excluding Tuesday 16th April when I’ll be there on the previous Sunday 14th April, 12-4pm). Do come and see how exquisite Marie’s work is and I’d love to hear anecdotes from those that knew her and stories from your experiences of the Yorkshire Dales (please note, museum admission charges apply).

Loose Ends and Exciting Beginnings!

Posted on March 19, 2019 by hestercoxprintmaker

So…I’m going to be regularly using my blog again for an exciting new project but before I start that, I just wanted to tie up a few loose ends regarding ‘Within These Walls’. Since I last wrote, I have been commissioned to recreate the central collagraph print for a hospital in Sweden. It is undergoing major building work and there is a pillar in the main reception area that they would like to hang my work from so I spent October/November of last year reprinting it! No small order as it required a few trips to Northern Print to use their lovely big electric intaglio press and then I had to line it and sew it.

The pillar is grey so my contact, Torbjörn, suggested that it it might be better if the material was more opaque. Unfortunately, I used the transparency of the lovely cotton voile so that I could see through to register the plates each time so it looked like lining it would be the best option. That ended up being quite a mammoth task but I used an iron-on cotton interfacing which worked well as it provided a bit of stability too. It was a bit of a nightmare to attach but I was able to hire the village hall again and lay the work out. I was methodical and careful and I also put a few eyelets down the sides so that the work can be secured away from the wall with bolts if needed. Due to a scalpel disaster, I managed to bleed over the work at one point but luckily blood washes out with cold water…

Then I enlisted the help of my lovely friends Sheila Smith and Lorraine Garlick and they hemmed the whole thing for me. They did the most amazing job including handstitching the pockets for the acrylic rods with invisible stitching. I have learned so much from them both and am forever grateful for their patience and enthusiasm.

Then it was a case of cutting the new acrylic rods to size, securing the screw-eyes in the ends and rolling the whole thing up in acid-free tissue ready for sending by courier to Sweden. It was a little pricey but Euro-Trans Despatch delivered it safely in less than 24 hours! As is the way of the world, building work has been delayed and the hospital isn’t finished yet so I don’t have any photos of it in situ but I promise to post some when I do.

In summary, I was planning to develop this project but unfortunately, the next venue for it fell through, time has passed and I’ve got involved in other projects but I have been so lucky to have had two of the monotypes on paper purchased for public display in Sweden, the commission for the hospital and also my monotype, Meadowsweet, selected for the 2018/19 New Light Prize Exhibition. I’ve now just found out that the collagraph panel will be on display as part of PrintFest7Oaks in May 2019. I’m so pleased to be a part of this event. It is a print festival held in Sevenoaks founded and directed by Christina France. Christina is also a member of Ålgården Studios and this year she has planned two shows for PrintFest7Oaks. The first will be by members of Ålgården Studios and held at The Kaleidoscope Gallery and I have been invited to show the collagraph at that. I will also be giving a talk at the gallery in the evening of the 9th May to discuss my connection with Ålgården and how the installation came about. I will then have a piece of work as an invited artist for Printfest7 at Ålgården Studio Gallery in September. All exciting stuff and there will be lots of information and links on my website.

So for the next year I am going to be blogging far more regularly about a project that I’ve just begun with the Dales Countryside Museum in Hawes. look out for the first post on that in the coming days…

Catching up on ‘Within These Walls’

Posted on February 19, 2018 by hestercoxprintmaker

It’s a good seven months since I wrote following the installation of my large-scale print project, ‘Within These Walls’. I had hoped to have time to sit and write a poetical and reflective account and in hoping to do that, it never happened! 2017 was a year that was intensely busy, very rewarding but with not a lot of breathing space. Strangely, the one time I had some head space was during the Grassington Festival when I was at the installation for four hours every day and often had little gaps of time alone. During these pauses, I wrote haiku, printed, drew and generally had a very relaxing and fulfilling time. My friend, the photographer Paul Harris, visited the installation and very kindly created this rather lovely film of it. It can be viewed HERE

The installation was a success in that I had over 335 visitors and all had positive things to say. I was humbled by just how many people reacted to the work within the space saying that it made them feel peaceful, calm & inspired. The word ‘ethereal’ was repeatedly used and many felt that the barn took on the aura of a sacred space such as a church or cathedral. One woman told me she had visited early on a few occasions so that she could have the space to herself and wander amongst the hangings. A few comments from my guestbook sum up nicely the general feeling amongst my visitors:

“really suits the space well and enjoyed the walking aspect to find the barn. Lovely combination of light and shade & movement of the wind on the hangings”

“…the soul of this wondrous dale, thank you…”

“beautiful work in a special ancient place. Hay meadows & swallows – perfect summer image”

“fab to enjoy the swallows, art and barn on the longest summer day, many thanks”

“beautiful work – perfect for this peaceful space. Images make sense of ambient sounds”

“didn’t expect this! beautiful work in a special ancient place. Haymeadows and swallows in this wonderful old barn. Cheered up a dull day”

I also hadn’t envisaged just how much I would enjoy being within the space. Everyday was different and the light changed throughout each afternoon. Sometimes I would watch a spot of sunlight travel across the barn floor and up the hangings, other times they would whip about in the wind and, on many occasions, the parents of a brood of swallow chicks would fly amongst them.

Since the festival, I have had one of the paper monotypes from ‘Within These Walls’ accepted for the New Light Prize Exhibition and it is currently touring having just finished the opening show at the Bowes Museum. I’m at Ålgården in Sweden at the moment and my original plan was to work on some large-scale paper prints to act as an exhibition to show alongside the hangings but, as yet, I don’t have a definite date and space in which to show them and another deadline (my next Collections project show) is looming. Conscious of all the work I need to do over the next few months for the Hepworth Print Fair (with Printmakers Circle), Printfest, West Dean Design and Craft Fair and ‘Collections’ at Sunny Bank Mills (not to mention the fact that I’m part of a team of artists trying to get a Three Peaks Art Trail off the ground for July 2018), I’ve put the development of the work on hold….temporarily. This is a project that I feel that I could work on for quite a few years to come. I’d really like more concentrated time to forget everything else and focus purely on making a body of work related to the installation but as an artist who makes all of their living from their printmaking, that involves exhibitions, shows, art fairs, talks and workshops and so I’m constantly busy and switching between deadlines. I could either do with some development funding or I will just have to work in fits and starts – as and when I can. Either way, I know I have the determination to carry it forward so watch this space!

I also have a new website (which I built in January in between doing my tax return!) so do check it out, it has a gallery for ‘Within These Walls’: www.hestercox.com

My thanks must go to Kate Beard (director of the Grassington Festival) for making the leap of faith and including me in the festival programme; Ian Harland for letting me use his barn and for all his hard work, support and cups of coffee; Paul Harris for his lovely film; Jo Denison for her beautiful photographs; my husband Brian for his continued encouragement and support (especially at 4am when I was lying awake worrying); my mum and Ian for helping on installation day and Matt Light for doing the scary bit of climbing up a huge ladder to install the five 4 metre long hangings (whilst having a small child and large puppy to look after)!

Hester Cox: Printmaker

Thoughts from Hester's printmaking studio and beyond.

Category Archives: art