When I sit quietly watching and drawing, I notice so much more than I thought was there before I started. This is what I love about observational drawing, either with a pencil or with an etching needle on a prepared zinc plate. I have always enjoyed working in line, sensitive to the edges of things, and etching lends itself very well to this. The process, preparing the plate, making the image, biting the plate in acid, inking up and taking a proof, gives me time to think, to work slowly, to adapt to anything unintentional that’s happened when the plate has been in the acid or when the ink is applied or print taken so, although it may seem a very controlled way of working, unexpected things can ambush you at each stage and they have to be accommodated – I enjoy this challenge (usually!).
I originally trained as a graphic designer at Chelsea School of Art, learnt to etch after that and had my own press and studio for many years. More recently, I studied for another degree, in Illustration, at Anglia Ruskin in Cambridge. This course helped me to loosen up my work, have the confidence to work more from imagination and to introduce more colour. I continue to etch but I also enjoy other forms of printmaking, such as monoprinting which I tend to do by working directly on paper, applying the ink as a flat colour with a roller or palette knife, often through stencils.
I am a member of Sudbourne Park Printmakers and exhibit with them twice a year in Suffolk.
I have sold my prints in various galleries around East Anglia and SW London and have also had work shown in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, Not-the-Royal-Academy, the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers .
Mary Seymour 