Simon Brett - Woodengraver

home

prints

Wood engraving is a print-making medium. Prints are the main work of a printmaker. Wood engraving is also an illustrators' and a graphic artist's medium. Most of the prints I make are used as 'applied art' - illustrations, bookplates, logos etc. When illustrations appeal as individual images, separate from their text, as they often do, their blocks too may be editioned (see below), signed and issued as prints. But other engravings are made just as art, as images for their own sake to hang on the wall or to collect. The images on this page are of that kind: my work as a printmaker.

Intimations. ©1985
Though these two engravings were included in a book, A Pilgrim's Manual - St. David's, they were conceived as independent prints from the start.

Restoratives - Hobbes's Whale. ©1988
Made as an illustration for poems by John Gohorry, but of a character to stand alone as a print, too.

Night Waters ©1999
One of a series of London river scenes

Brucefield Mains. ©2002
This image is 50% size. Click the image for a full size version.

Run for your Country, Run for your Life, 2003.
The eighth to be completed in on-going sequence of thematic prints, Axe of God.
This image is 50% size. Click the image for a full size version.

A note on editioning and on 'original prints'
Every print pulled from a woodblock is an 'original print' because inking the block and printing it is the only way to produce that image. Specifically, it is the way the artist has chosen to produce it, because of the qualities given by the particular process; in my case, I love the finesse and the rich tones of wood engraving. If the print produced in that way is then photographed, scanned into this website, photocopied etc., it is being reproduced (as most images we see around us are). When producing prints, it is customary for printmakers to limit the number they take from any one block, to number each print so as to indicate the limitation, and then to sign it. This 'authenticates' the product and clarifies its 'status': the 'fraction', say 5/45, seen on a print indicates that it is the fifth print in an edition of forty-five (but since all are from the block the fifth is in no way superior to the fifteenth or the twenty-fifth).