Steve Manning

Maker ShowcasePast Exhibition

25 Nov

Written By Laura Wasley

Maker Showcase

Exploring, through lino printing, billowing clouds and liminal places rendered with a lightness of touch and painterly quality reminiscent of watercolours.

Steve’s work attempts to capture the essence of a landscape type rather than a specific location, although recognisable landmarks do appear in his prints. He is drawn to distant vistas, big skies and liminal places, such as marshes, estuaries and coast, where sky and water meet.

Attempting to render natural ephemera using a medium more often associated with bold colours, laid down with multiple lino blocks, has been a challenge. To achieve this, Steve adopted the reduction print process and devised methods to push the medium to create a lightness of touch, uncharacteristic for lino printing.

Reduction printing is an unforgiving discipline because, as the process progresses and more layers are removed, the block is gradually destroyed. This requires a lot of forward planning and leaves little room for error. Although challenging, the benefit of this method is that only one block needs to be registered thereby avoiding the risk of misregistration which can occur with the traditional multi block process.

The lightness of touch is attained by lightening colours with white, thinning with extender, not over-loading the roller with ink and applying more subtle pressure with a hand baren rather than the press where necessary.

Some of Steve’s recent work uses the lino block as a mono print plate, laying down blended colours to create soft reflections or clouds. In some pieces he combines this with slightly textured paper which produces a pleasing slightly unfinished, or stippled effect.

The end results are prints which could be described as having a ‘painterly’ quality.

25 Nov 2023 - 27 Jan 2024

Maker Showcase Gallery

Events

Sat 25 Nov, 10am - 4pm: Meet the Maker & Demo

Wed 20 Dec, 10am - 4pm: Meet the Maker & Demo

Inside the gallery

Take a virtual tour through the exhibition. Press the play button and use the white circle to move around the gallery space.

For the best experience, view in full screen by clicking on the square symbol at the bottom right.

About the exhibitor

stevemanningprints.co.uk

Steve Manning | Printmaking | Devon

Steve learnt his print making skills at Exeter’s Double Elephant Print Workshop. He works out of an attic studio commanding fine views of his favoured subject, clouds and sky.

Steve uses reduction lino printing to produce limited edition spacious landscapes inspired by marsh, moorland and estuaries. This is a challenging discipline because the lino block is gradually destroyed as subsequent layers are cut away, leaving little room for error.

Skies and clouds provide the focus of Steve’s images, the cloudscape often informing the overall composition. The challenge is to render distant vistas and ethereal skies using a medium usually associated with bold blocks of colour. Steve achieves this by either lightening colours with white or thinning them with extender. The end result is prints imbued with a ‘painterly’ quality.

Reduction printmaking is not a spontaneous discipline. ‘The creation of my prints is a painstaking, frustrating, frequently complicated and an occasionally unsuccessful exercise using a medium not entirely suited to rendering the ephemeral nature of my chosen subject matter! I should be a watercolourist but I love the combination of craft and fine art printmaking offers.’