Lines And Shapes

JAKE SPICER’S new series looks at the compositional lessons we can learn from the masters. He begins by exploring the graphic prints of the Grosvenor School.

Brushstrokes directly record the speed and rhythm of the painter’s gestures, preserving stillness or dynamism in the dried layer of a single artefact – a painting. Printmakers, by contrast, create artwork that is intended for reproduction and must imbed energy into the image itself. Stillness is implicit in the methodical, subtractive process of relief printing so dynamism must be injected into the print through its composition, through the design of interacting shapes on the picture plane.

Never has the potential for movement in printmaking been so clearly exemplified than in the linocuts of the Grosvenor School artists, a group of printmakers who, under the tutelage of Claude Flight, captured the burgeoning mechanical energy of 1930s Britain in powerful graphic images.

In the first of three new articles, I’ll be exploring the compositional lessons that we can learn from looking at other artists work, each focusing on a different compositional aspect. Over the next few pages we’ll explore the use of shape in the prints on show at Dulwich Picture Gallery’s current exhibition Cutting Edge: Modernist British Printmaking.

LINES

Horizontal and vertical lines in an image create a sense of stability, where diagonal lines create instability. Look at the room around you – if the walls are vertical and the floor horizontal then you know you are stably planted, you are safe; if the floor tilts away to one side and walls slope in the opposite direction, your stability is in jeopardy.