Jamie Richards is a recent graduate illustrator/printmaker from Cardiff, Wales. His interests currently lie within relief printmaking, more specifically linocut and rubber-stamping. Jamie’s printmaking journey started back in lockdown; “As a first-year creative student, like many of us, I felt the weight and struggle of working from home, feeling as if I was missing out on the opportunities within my creative degree.” As a substitute, he was kindly sent a linocut kit by the university, and immediately he was hooked. Fast forward 2 years, Jamie is now completely engrossed within the process, making multiple prints a week whilst exploring its vast boundaries.
“In terms of subject matter, I like to keep options open and restricting myself to specific focuses doesn’t work for me,” says the printmaker. Nevertheless, there are recurring themes that revolve around nature, heritage, and a general documentation of what he sees and feels within that moment of time. He comments; “Due to the uprise of social media, inspiration is everywhere. But I’m inspired mainly by process. As a methodical thinker I love learning new processes and perfecting the ones I already know, this could be in my printmaking, papermaking, or bookbinding.”
Although still in the early days of his career, Jamie has been supported by a few different local associations, such as Arthole Cardiff and The Printhaus. Printhaus have just taken him on as their graduate award winner, and he’ll be spending the next year alongside them and their community of printmakers. Jamie has also started to run a few linocut and rubber-stamp workshops around Cardiff, and has attended many UK traders markets as a stallholder.
Since concentrating on his printmaking practice, Jamie has been involved in a few different collaborative projects, including Sanctuary, a project where students from Cardiff Metropolitan University and Lviv National Academy of Arts teamed up and discussed the idea of what ‘sanctuary’ means to them within the context of war. Derived from this were 22 individual two-colour Risograph prints, all wrapped up in a hand screened binding. All of the proceeds from the edition were donated to Lviv in support against the war.
Jamie studied Illustration at Cardiff school of Art Design, and recently graduated with a 1st class degree. Here, he was introduced to the printmaking by CSAD printmaking TD, Tom Martin. He now aspires to become a printmaking technical demonstrator or technician himself, alongside his current printmaking practice.
This year, Jamie will also be exploring screenprinting in depth, learning the ins-and-outs of the process to eventually combine relief and screen together to produce mixed media multi-layered prints. Recently, he has been inspired by the work of Jason Logan, and is currently reading and evaluating his book, Make Ink. As a result, Jamie has started making his own natural inks to be more sustainable within his practice.
@jr__illustration
www.jr-illustration.com
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