Printmaker Sally-Anne Stewart is the winner of the 2024 Artweeks Mary Moser Award, an annual award intended to help develop the career of a professional artist who has taken up art as a second career later in life. Artweeks Festival Director Esther Lafferty visited her to find out about her art.
In linocut printing, pieces of linoleum are hand-carved – a kind of fine-art version of children’s potato printing; the ‘non-image’ areas are cut away and the raised surfaces or the ‘relief’ is inked and pressed to paper. For different colours, different blocks are printed onto the same paper to create a final image. Alternatively, a single block may be used several times, each after additional carving has taken place.
“Printmaking is a relatively new thing for me. At school, I enjoyed art and took art A level. I never had the chance to do printmaking. Pencil was my preferred medium and my drawings tended to be accurate and realistic. Printmaking is very different in that it knocks the edges of your accuracy because you can’t control it so precisely, either the carving or the adding paint. I have found it weirdly therapeutic, relinquishing some of that control and relish a bit of a surprise at the end of the process. I started out watching YouTube videos before finding out what was going on locally, gradually creating more complex pieces. I do like to give myself a challenge”.
Working from home during Covid was great preparation for completely working on my own. However, while I was never thrilled by the ‘corporate meetings’ of my previous role, I do miss the team. My husband’s transition to freelance had also illustrated the importance of a network for opportunities and – for morale, too. That’s one of the things that has been so great about Oxfordshire Artweeks for me; it’s a brilliant vehicle for social interaction and I’ve met so many lovely people through it.”
Now, in addition to creating her own work, Sally runs regular linocut classes and has started a podcast, Art Musings, with another East Oxford Artweeks artist Carole Theriault in which they ask a variety of artists about their loves, learnings, fears and hopes as they negotiate the art world.
To follow Sally on social media, it’s @print_sal or see more of Sally’s work at etsy logo/shop/lineandlightart