Collection: Liz Sommerville

Liz Somerville graduated from Winchester School of Art in 1988 with a degree in textile design and, after living and working in London, moved to Dorset in 2004 to concentrate on her printmaking.

Inspired by the simplicity and ‘Englishness’ of Eric Ravillious and Edward Bawden’s work, and the ever-changing countryside surrounding the studio, her imagery concentrates on landscape and the incidental forms and structures found within it. Her most recent work explores the texture, rhythm and muscularity of land.

‘Printmaking has always been a love of mine. I’ve played with lots of different techniques and relief printing, linocuts and woodcuts combined with painted blocks of colour, is, for me, the most satisfactory method. Living in Dorset, landscape is a central theme and the winter the best time to see it; plough and livestock tracks, oddly shaped fields, quirky colour. I like flow, lyricism and mark-making. I don’t have a press as I like to work large, so I use a wooden spoon instead. It works very well and gives me the freedom to work at more or less whatever scale I want to. I use paint instead of printed blocks of colour, for the same reason. The upshot of this is that each piece is unique; eventually, over a period of years, up to 15 (sometimes 20) versions of each piece is made, instead of a numbered edition. These techniques are very much a means to an end; the overall effect is what I’m after, I’m no slave to convention.’ - Liz Somerville, 2016

Linocuts in series of 15 are individually hand-coloured, and there will be some colour differences between each linocut in the series.  We illustrate one version within each series, but the version you receive will not necessarily have exactly the same colouration.