It’s hard to make a living as an artist directly from our art. To sell art, we need a following, some sort of place of display our work to the outside world (e.g. virtual shop, gallery representation) and an audience who will hopefully love what we do enough to spend their hard-earned currency on it and make it their own. Exactly how that might work depends on what we make – installation artists are likely to need big spaces and arts funding (and might not sell at all), others might create unique pieces that can be displayed relatively easily (paintings, sculptures and so on), and some may produce editions of prints or other series of items. Merch. Goods. Wares. Some are commercial, some are not; some seek to be commercial, some actively avoid it, many are somewhere in between. Some run workshops or seek commissions, some don’t. All these approaches are fine. We are all different and so is our art.
I probably lie somewhere in the middle – I mainly produce unique objects which aren’t primarily decorative, though I’m more than happy for a gallery to put them on sale. I make art for people to see, and I do price it – if someone wants to take it home, that’s great, but its primary function is experience – how it makes someone feel, what it makes them think about. It might look good on the wall, but that’s rarely why I make something. Arts income is a precious, welcome but rare thing, even more so given that exhibitions and so on have been cancelled by Covid. However, I do also produce occasional series of work, particularly prints based around my love of intricacy. I’ve always drawn as a hobby, since childhood and long before I thought of myself as an artist – my first career was in the sciences and I ended up as an entomologist. Intricacy was there too in the form of small insects. It’s clearly something I find intriguing as I always come back to it.
Of course, intricacy in handmade, physical work tends to be time-consuming and therefore expensive if we are to value ourselves and our work. If I spend a month drawing something, then it has to cost a month’s income, but I might not be able to command a price in the £1000s, even if it is well received. One option is therefore making prints – a number of similar items from one intricate original. These can be photo-prints (essentially what you get if you buy a print of a painting), or they can be produced by one of many print-making techniques (linocut, etchings, woodblock and so on.) I do a bit of both, but recently I’ve focused more on the latter following a course at Southampton’s Red Hot Press, and found myself enjoying drypoint and linocut in particular. Linocut might be the more familiar of the two, carving into a sheet of lino and inking the remaining surface much like we might make a potato print as a child, though the sheet can be bigger, lasts longer and has sharper edges. You can’t eat the offcuts of lino though. They don’t make nice chips. Drypoint is a type of etching using a plastic sheet and scratching the image into the surface with a needle or other tools – drawing with a pin to some extent. You then force ink into the design, wipe away the excess from the surface so those parts stay white (more or less) and make a print.
So, what have I produced and where is it? Well, I’ve made a small number of mounted drypoint prints entitled Foot Archer of a contortionist performing foot archery (yes, it’s a thing) plus a series of Love on the oily storm-tossed Sea original linocut greetings cards exploring my love of the weird and supernatural. These are currently on sale through the God’s House Tower shop who’ve kindly offered to stock my wares – mail order or by local collection while shut due to Covid but hopefully available in person via real-life browsing soon…
Dave Hubble 