Steve Manning
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.’