#clareleighton

DA110 .L34

DA110 .L34

DA110 .L34

THE CANADIAN LUMBER CAMP: These two wintery snow scenes are part of a group of six large wood-engravings that the British printmaker Clare Leighton produced following a trip to Canada in the winter of 1930-31. She made a week-long visit to a remote French-Canadian lumber camp in the Laurentian Mountains north of Ottawa on the Quebec-Ontario border, where she produced drawings of lumberjacks at work in snowy woodland, and then translated them into engravings cut and printed from end-grain. Her ability to use wood-engraving to so elegantly convey the extraordinary monochrome light of a snow scene is remarkable; with a balance of silhouetted figures, glistening white snow and greyscale shadows. I find it very poetic as a project: the whole thing is about the cutting and transportation of timber, expressed through a medium that required the cutting and engraving of wood - on paper which was itself the end result of the whole thing. The artist described them to a friend while still executing the blocks as “by far the best things I’ve done.” These are ‘Breaking Camp’ and ‘Landing’ from the English edition - in the 1939 Leighton moved permanently to the USA, and so many of her prints are in public institutions there. For example, these are in the collections of @auburnu @terraamericanart @brit_visualarts @artinstitutechi @clevelandmuseumofart @themintmuseum and @britishmuseum #woodengraving #clareleighton #canada #canadianart #snow #lumbercamp #printmaking (at Brighton and Hove) https://www.instagram.com/p/CI-XXGHlvtQ/?igshid=6uzf59hm6dx0

A wet wild day here in Cumbria.... image a wood engraving by Clare Leighton from her book 'Where Land Meets Sea, The Tide Line of Cape Cod' #clareleighton

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