Anne James views a display to mark four decades of a print collective

Four decades ago, a group of artists formed one of the city’s most enduring artistic ventures.

Marking its 40th anniversary next year, the Oxford Printmakers Co-operative is a not-for-profit open-access fine art print studio, which brings together artists who share a common love of traditional printing methods and covers a diverse range of subjects.

The co-operative provides workshop facilities at its home at the Christadelphian Hall, in Tyndale Road, and an impressive range of equipment for members and others to use.

Its latest exhibition, Impressions, is in a setting as impressive as the work itself: the new Sewell Gallery at Radley College. It consists of 82 hung prints, plus browsers offering further work.

Included is a display of the tools of the printmaking trade, which ably demonstrates the wide range of techniques and materials used and an insight into the highly skilled and intensive process of printmaking.

The subject matter is broad: landscapes, seascapes, formal historic buildings – such as Michael Evans’s The Handsomest Barn in England, animals – both industrious and indolent, plants and abstracts.

There are also references to the fact that all may not be what it seems, such as Ann Spencer’s Behind the Scenes: The Dame, and her Tea Time. In the former, artifice is laid bare, as the panto star is posed wigless and cigarette in hand, yet it is presented in a pretty plate-shaped print, its frame composed of autumnal leaves and berries.

Tea Time consists of a similarly decorated plate shape encircled in pretty flowers and fruits, but frames an unlikely jumble of a stationary JCB and driver frozen in time between a full skip and a skeletal tree.

Printer Neil Drury uses monoprint, where the images painted on to the surface of the printing plate are transferred under pressure to damp paper.

He crowns this with pastels, creating sumptuous celebratory pieces such as Bouquet with Pears and Grapes, where the central jug positively exudes joie de vivre as blooms and fruits explode from its solid centre.

Jane Walker uses reduction lino cut in her Black Jug, to reinterpret a three dimensional table of jugs, flowers and fruits into a two dimensional series of patterns that both celebrate their own place in time and space and their relationship to each other.

Nicky Cooney provides two delightful and fun lino cuts. Tiptoe Thru’ The Tulips is a hand-coloured print that celebrates the centre stage taken by a clearly non-negotiable cat. The print is hung alongside her black and white piece, Round and Round, a lino cut of a stream of slim fish swimming quite determinately into a vortex at the heart of the piece.

Diana Ashdown also works in lino cut. By varying the depth of the cuts, she manages to provide pieces such as Meandering, where the celebratory background to the silhouetted trees and the quite individual swimming geese stand proud of the rest of the piece.

Also included are two of her black and white pieces. One is her quirky Beetles, an unlikely phalanx of militant beetles, each resplendent in its own individual carapace and markings. The other is Indecision on the North York Moors, where undecided sheep play follow my leader, or in some cases not, poised against a patchwork landscape.

Oxford Mail:
Bouquet with Pears and Grapes by Neil Drury

Jackie Conway’s two portraits of Bury Knowle (Tree) Colour and Bury Knowle (Tree) Black, both emphasise the strength and dominance of trees in a park landscape; the first celebrating the warm, vibrant colours of a sunny day, the latter the mysterious and shadowy entities that both park and tree become at night.

Jenny Lines, whose hands are pictured, is working on an etching plate made of metal. The landscape has much in common with her gentle etching Looking Brighter, in which a shaded foreground dominated by trunk and branches, gives way to an optimistic open stretch of water and moor beyond.

Its subject matter is in contrast to others of her etchings: Veils and Women’s Work III, both of which explore the often hidden world of women’s use of fabric and the ways in which they quietly and competently bring different materials together to create a competent whole.

At a time when arts’ funding is under pressure and galleries and museums increasingly need to charge, the Sewell Gallery provides an excellent opportunity to see work of the highest order, free of charge.

Oxford Printmakers Co-operative: Impressions
Sewell Gallery, Radley College
Until March 23,
oxfordprintmakers.co.uk