Print heroes

Stanley Donwood. You may not know his name but you will almost certainly have seen his work – as have millions of other music fans across the world – for Donwood is the man responsible for designing the album artwork for the band Radiohead. Unlike many artists, Donwood shifts genre from project to project – a lot of his earlier work was created on computers, but his last two exhibitions have seen him switch seamlessly from linocuts to intaglio etchings. PrintWeek caught up with him in Soho for a rare face-to-face chat with the publicity-shy artist.

Where did the inspiration for your latest work ‘If you lived here you’d be home by now’ come from?
We live in an age where everything around us is reliant on oil, but this resource is running out. I started to think about that and about how suburbia as an environment is not sustainable and simply doesn’t work. These huge suburbs are going to be disaster zones, not just slums, and this work was a response to that – an apocalyptic vision of the future.

Why did you decide to use etchings to portray this vision?
I was doing pencil drawings and thinking about suburbia and then I thought that it would be interesting to cover something modern using an ancient technique.

How did you learn the craft of etching?
It was pretty easy. I got books from the library on etching, then from the engineering shop around the corner from me I bought some off cuts of copper plates, put some ground on and then drew onto them with a needle. After that you have to mix up some acid to the right strength, put the plate in, ink it and then print it. I started small and then went bigger – I was stupidly ambitious. The plan was to do 10 etchings and 33 prints – it takes 20-30 minutes per print.

Where did you make the prints?
I looked on the internet to find a studio and I managed to find one in Cambridge – St Barnabas Press. They’ve got an etching press there that was built in 1850. It has a huge wheel that you turn to make the bed go through the rollers and the wheel is encrusted with 150 years of inky hands.

What about the linoprint work you did for your London Views exhibition that portrayed an apocalyptic panorama of London? How did that come about?
This project began a couple of years ago, the day after I witnessed the flood in Boscastle. I had to leave the house I was staying at in a bit of a hurry, and retreated to higher ground, where I drank whisky and watched the flood, hoping that I wouldn’t see a body in the raging torrent. I had a copy of the Liber Chronaricum, or Nuremberg Chronicle, with me, and began drawing images loosely based on the woodcuts in it.

Why did you choose linocutting?
Linocutting, or woodcutting, is an interesting thing. It’s as if the really personal effect you get with drawing or painting is negated, because everything has to be done back-to-front, with a chisel, and you don’t really know how it will look until you’ve finished, inked the block, and taken a proof. So, in one way, I like it because it isn’t me. I can still be surprised at the moment of peeling the paper from the inked block. And it’s very crude. I like the crudeness and badly-printed nature of early printing. Some of the stuff in the Chronaricum is rubbish, but it’s good rubbish. I really like mistakes, and when you make a mistake with linocutting there’s no going back.

How long did it take to produce the image from start to finish?
Each block, which is about 12x9in, took about a full day to cut. On and off, I worked on the whole panorama from about November until March. But I was doing another project for Radiohead at the same time.

What determined your choice of paper?
To be honest, in most cases it was whatever was available. The proofs and the prints done from the individual blocks were on Zerkall 140gsm stock. But when it came to the 12ft long complete panoramas, I had to use Japanese kozo paper, because these had to be hand-burnished and you need a thin, strong and flexible paper for that. I tried using cheap stuff but it didn’t work at all. The screenprints are done on Colorplan ice white, 270gsm I think.

Could you tell us more about the jigsaw puzzles? You say on your website that they are the most expensive jigsaws ever produced?
They were made by the Wentworth Wooden Jigsaw Company. I provided them with artwork on a PDF and they make the wooden board and then laser-cut it. They’re very beautiful; 192 pieces, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s fiendishly difficult. I don’t actually know what the most expensive jigsaw ever is (I’m kind of fond of hyperbole) but these are £99.99. Though there are only 50 of them.

What else have you been working on?
I’ve done a series of “pointless platitudes” screenprints that are being sold by Pictures on Walls. I’ve wanted to do something like that for some time so I got a calligraphy book and started experimenting but it looked wrong. So I created some decorative gold letters that were printed faintly with new platitudes on like ‘Nothing will ever get better’ and ‘F**k it’ and then I drew some rambling roses and thorns around them. They look really pretty but they’re really depressing.
Source: printweek