Rabley Gallery: LOPF Online | The Platform For Prints

Rabley Gallery

This year, you will find Rabley Gallery in the west wing of Somerset House, Room W14, where the 18th century window casts light on the curious Understudy portraits by Natasha Michaels. The faces of these monotypes are at once familiar and challenging, all proxy to the original paintings that have inspired them to be envisaged. Each is intermingled with fleurettes of white porcelain by ceramicist, Jo Taylor.

Alongside are the newest landscape prints of arctic ranges and tempestuous skies by Emma Stibbon RA, and the calm Japanese style woodcuts of Sara Lee. It is a pleasure to bring together an installation that is at once contemporary and eclectic.

We have selected a range of new woodcut and block prints for the fair, each sharing a love of the unique qualities transferred via the woodblock, though the printmaking process, to the print. Eileen Cooper RA, Paul Furneaux and Nana Shiomi bring three very individual presences. Eileen Cooper has a recognisable love of the human spirit in Songbird and Sunset where figures dance and climb into trees. Japanese artist, Nana Shiomi embodies her ideas with cultural references using symbolic Morning Glory flowers. These woodcuts have shared origins with the poetic abstract Mokuhanga woodblock prints of Paul Furneaux.

Lucy Farley takes us for a walk in Holland Park with hand-finished lithographs that are at once contemporary and pay homage to the 20th century aesthetic of Lanyon and Sutherland. Sarah Gillespie’s’ moths emerge into the light from velvet black mezzotints with Lament for the Bordered Gothic and Nottingham Catchfly & Whitespot Moth.

Newly elected Royal Academician, Katherine Jones RA continues to create work that pulls us into a nuanced field of meaning; combining her love of flora, contemplations on her life as an artist and as a mother.

Words by Meryl Ainslie.