Hand Carved Magpie is Brittany Robert, a Cookeville, USA based linocut printmaker. Brittany grew up making art, and as a child she would spend hours recreating images from comics and cartoons that she admired. She was drawn to whimsy, humour, odd creatures, and concepts like magic, which are influences still evident in her printmaking practice today.
Art also acted as an escape for Brittany whilst she was growing up. She tells us; “I was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease when I was about 10 years old and making things with my hands was always a happy distraction to take my mind off the pain and discomfort I was in”. She would make cards for people, paint on t-shirts, make clay flowers, decorate mugs, and collage. But somewhere over the years, Brittany stopped drawing. She states; “I still did creative things, but I wasn’t drawing or painting anymore, and it was a hole in my life that I didn’t realise was missing until I started doing it again.”
At the end of 2019, Brittany became a mother, and then the pandemic hit. She tells us; “I began feeling a little lost. Being isolated from family was hard. Being a mom was wonderful, but also hard.” Looking for something to make her feel like herself again, she stumbled upon a YouTube video about establishing creative daily habits and committing to drawing the same thing every day. Liking the idea, Brittany committed herself to drawing her daughter every day. This ended up being the spark that she needed to reignite her passion for art.
Brittany has kept up her drawing practice every day since 2020, and has continued to evolve the mediums she experiments with. It wasn’t until March of this year that she discovered linocut printmaking. She comments; “I love the slow, meditative process of carving, the magic of that first ink pull and the texture of the ink on paper. It changed the way I think about negative and positive space in artwork and challenged me to get better every day.” Brittany decided to start a “100 Day Challenge” to experiment and learn more about the technique, and completely fell in love with the process.
Today, her designs are largely inspired by elements of nature, animals, whimsical characters, and magic. “Making prints of these topics helps me feel more connected to the natural world and helps me to remember to stop and look around at all the beauty that surrounds us,” says the printmaker.
Most often, Brittany works on a fairly small scale, carving 4×6 pink rubber blocks either as full illustrations or as individual smaller stamps. She also enjoys carving pink erasers; “Carving something so small has its own challenges–you have to be really mindful of every line you cut and sometimes have to adjust your design to make sure your image is clear”. Brittany recently partook in a “Pink Eraser Artober” challenge on Instagram, where she carved one eraser every day for the entire month of October based on a new prompt each day. She states; “This has been a fun way to challenge myself in terms of words that I wouldn’t normally use to inspire artwork. I’ve also found that I love printing my erasers with waterproof, Archival Ink and colouring in the prints with watercolour colour pencils to add a pop of colour.”
As a stay-at-home-mom, a lot of Brittany’s work happens in the “in-between” moments when her daughter is settled into an activity or at school. She has taken over the dining room table and kitchen nook as her workspace, with lines for drying prints hanging all over the walls, antique cabinets that she inherited from her grandmother for supplies, and her Woodzilla printing press. Most of her work is conducted at night, once the rest of her household is asleep. This nocturnal nature of her work schedule has also seeped into her artwork, with her prints often depicting the moon and nocturnal animals such as owls, moths, and bats.
Brittany is looking forward to more learning and growing as an artist. She concludes; “I dance between wanting to make detailed, realistic, large-scale images that I admire in other artists as well as making more simplistic, blocky images for contemporary, fun patterns. My dream is to be able to make a liveable income on my artwork so I can do what I love every day and support my family.”
www.handcarvedmagpie.com
@handcarvedmagpie
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