Amended: March 2010

Artist's statement

Lynne Roebuck, a fine artist specialising in limited edition original prints, describes her current fine art practice.

My art is about the impressions of landscape we carry with us.

Printmaking feels like a natural discipline to have gravitated to, given my years as an illustrator and designer. There is a great deal of 'design' work involved in developing an image as an original print. Cutting plates for each ink, also feels similar to a print process I've worked with for years.

What keeps me working is the quest to define an image each time, that captures the impression of a location, something a photograph surprisingly perhaps, rarely achieves. I describe it as: “Landscape as we feel it to be”. My goal is to create images which are evocative, atmospheric, distilled and modern; landscapes that look imagined, or are imagined, yet are instantly understood as real – recognizable.

Relief print evolved from sketched impressions of 'Kilburn White Horse, Yorkshire'.

Identifying and developing an image

I start by exploring a location; 'getting-to-know' it directly and seeking the iconic, memorable view or qualities of the place. This can involve many visits, thumbnails, exploratory photos and rough sketches, out of which the final image comes. There is often another stage involving redrawing exercises back at the studio. While my artwork is the outcome of direct experience, I do not reproduce 'observed' sketches as prints. I spend a lot of time refining a composition and thinking through precisely how I'm going to produce the print, using the humble medium of lino – a medium, like all mediums, possessing its own distinctive qualities – and this affects the art.

Once satisfied with the composition and confident I can produce it, I cut the first plate. The artwork could be said to develop "a-life-of-it's-own" now, as I examine and adjust what I do after each step while always maintaining a focus on my original intention or plan. Contrary to the appearance of my relief prints, there is much experimentation during the printmaking process. After each plate (colour) is printed, a review takes place and often the subsequent plates develop a character that was not planned.

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Printmaking technique

Lino blocks in development for a series of original prints.

I often use several plates, or blocks, to create each original print – though I am experimenting with the 'reduction cut' method too. 'Reduction cut' involves only one plate which is cut away a little more after each application of ink. I find that using a completely fresh block for each ink is a more creatively open process, though there are distinct challenges to working this way. Some of my prints use a combination of reduction cut and separate plates. Of course, like most artists, I'm constantly testing my own boundaries and the way I produce finished work.

Relief print being pulled from the inked plate - 'Flamborough Lighthouse' landscape print.

Detail of a typical rough sketch for a print using pencil and charcoal. it shows old workings on the North York Moors – part of the Yorkshire landscape that inspires her work.

I think of myself as a 'fine artist' first, a 'fine artist-printmaker', with the development of a creative image my priority. I am not a traditional purist, focussed on a strict established routine for making prints, where all experimentation is removed once printing is underway. While I admire, study and draw upon the rich, long history of printmaking we have in the UK particularly, I seek to create images with character, that are first and foremost: 'a work of art'.

What are original prints?