New Zealand-born and London-based Anna Small is a Lino printer and dabbler in screenprinting. Anna first remembers printing at primary school, where her mother introduced her to the technique, showing her “how to make lines in lino, roll the ink, and slap it down on some paper creating a surprising negative effect that I was immediately fascinated with.” After many different artistic endeavours as a teenager, she started lino printing in earnest upon moving to Wellington in 2001. Her first print as an adult was done on actual floor lino; “I had forgotten that one should use the special thicker lino and was bamboozled by how hard it was to make a mark.”
Anna left Wellington for London in 2004, but her last act as a printer in New Zealand was to enter the Telecom Phone book cover competition, which she won! The cash prize she received enabled her to continue printing in the early years of living in London, but with so many other things on her plate, it was often relegated to a Christmas activity – a run of Christmas cards were usually produced and sent to friends and relatives. When covid hit and Anna was put on furlough she finally had some time to fully focus on printing. She tells us; “Joining Instagram opened my eyes in terms of how tools, especially, but techniques as well, could be much improved.” Anna bought a cheap screen and started to learn how to do screenprinting along with continuing to make efforts to improve her lino printing. Her screenprinting techniques are still fairly rudimentary, involving the cutting of laminate to create the prints, but Anna finds it “super fun and useful to be able to print such sharp lines and on fabric as well”.
Today, Lino printing continues to be her focus, with a particular emphasis on reduction printing. Anna states; “It has taken a lot of time and practice to really start to think in terms of blocks of colour rather than just drawing lines in the lino and making a basic negative line drawing.” Buying a small A5 press was instrumental in enhancing the quality of her prints, as well as her Japanese fine cutters and Pfeil tools, which she describes as “truly revolutionary”.
Each of her works begins with a pencil drawing, with notations of colour that will further develop intuitively as she creates the print. In any one run there will always be multiple colour combinations, regardless of the original colour combination she envisaged. Almost invariably, one of the less orthodox colour combinations emerges as her favourite!
Anna is currently working towards becoming a full-time printmaker, and we’re excited to see how her journey develops.
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