In her Speyside studio, Angie Lewin transforms sketches of the landscape into prints and paintings with the help of an old press, some trusty watercolours – and a wooden spoon
Scorper, spitsticker, bullsticker, graver… Angie Lewin savours the traditional names of her woodengraving tools almost as much as the delicate lines she coaxes from their tips. At her desk in her Banffshire studio, she holds, in her right hand, the spitsticker she’s had since art college and, in her left, a block of lemonwood, resting on a saucer-sized leather sandbag. “I’m moving the block, not the tool,” she says, as she rotates the hardwood against the curved blade to create the eyelash-shaped outline of a petal. “This engraving was inspired by pelargoniums I kept in the house over the winter.”
Fans of Angie’s work might be surprised that she has chosen potted garden plants as subjects. She is better known for prints that zoom in on wild plants in their habitats, capturing their interlocking forms through intricate details, from the veins of leaves to patterns on the surfaces of petals, imbuing her wood engravings and linocuts with immediacy and impact.
“For a long time, my work was defined by the coastal species near my home in Norfolk, such as thrift, alexanders and plantains,” she says. Since relocating to a hilltop between the Cairngorms and the Moray Firth, however, Angie has been drawn to cultivated garden flowers, too. “Years ago, I would never have drawn a peony or a dahlia because it didn’t fit with my aesthetic,” she says. “Now, I’m enjoying using loads of colour.”
SEEDS OF AMBITION
Angie grew up in Cheshire and always wanted to be an artist. Flowers weren’t her first inspiration – “There was a childhood phase of drawing mallard ducks, over and over” – but their structure caught her eye. On a sixth-form trip to Tate Britain, she was entranced by Alan Reynolds’ mid-century Summer: Late September’s Cornfield.
“I bought the postcard and it’s still on the wall in my studio,” says Angie, noting how the dandelion clock on that canvas found its way into her own work.
At London’s Central Saint Martin’s, Angie started studying sculpture but gravitated towards printmaking: “Perhaps it’s because my grandfather was a blacksmith and my dad was an engineer, but the manual element of it appealed.” After graduating, Angie spent another year specialising in printmaking at Camberwell College of Arts: “I like the fact there’s a process that informs the decisions you can make and the image you create.”
