Discover Top Posts Tagged with #matrix 11

Decorative Sunday

English designer Marthe Armitage (b. 1930) made a successful career of designing and manufacturing decorative wallpaper originally from handmade linocuts. Her designs have been featured in exhibitions, films, and documentaries. After studying at the Chelsea School of Art, Armitage began designing and hand printing linocut wallpaper designs in the 1950s. Her techniques moved to lithography, offset, and finally after 2018 to digital processes. The images shown her, including three original linocuts, are from her article "Patterns from Lino" in Matrix 11, Winter 1991, pp. 81-89, in which Armitage discusses her practice, evolutions in her methods, and her homage to William Morris. Today she is represented by the wallpaper design company Hamilton Weston. Armitage is a member and a former Master of the venerable Art Workers' Guild, which had its origins in the late 19th-century Arts and Crafts Movement.

These images of Marthe Armitage designs were snagged randomly from the Interwebs.

Matrix, printed at John and Rosalind Randle’s Whittington Press in Risbury, Herefordshire, England, is a donation from our late friend Jerry Buff.

View more posts on decorative papers.

View more Decorative Sunday posts.

#Decorative Sunday #Matrix 11 #Matrix #Decorative Paper #wallpaper designs #wallpaper #decorated papers #Marthe Armitage #Patterns from Linocuts #linocuts #John and Rosalind Randle #Whittington Press #decorative arts #Jerry Buff

Wood Engraving Wednesday

JOHN O’CONNOR

English wood engraver John O’Connor (1913-2004) wrote and illustrated an evocative autobiographical essay entitled Twins published in 1991 by the Whittington Press in Andoversford, Gloucestershire, in an edition of 350 copies. The text with seven of the original ten three-color wood engravings were also inserted between pages 144 and 145 of Matrix 11, Winter 1991, which is where the images shown here are from.

The essay describes a childhood meeting between O'Connor and his twin brother Tom, and the twin sisters who come to stay in the village of Knipton, Leicestershire, where the O’Connor twins were staying with relatives on a small farm in the valley overlooked by Belvoir Castle. The farm life of the 1920s, horse-drawn carts, the kitchen range, oil lamps, and the surrounding countryside all made an indelible mark on the mind of the 12-year-old O’Connor, and unconsciously became references for many of his subsequent paintings and wood engravings.

The memoir describes the growing friendship of the pair of twins in the mid 1920s, collecting eggs, hunting for fossils and mushrooms, inventing plays, and going to high tea: “They . . . eyed us with pleasure and amusement which we returned. Identical twin had met identical twin!” But all sweet things must come to an end: