B.

Paul Nash was a member of England’s Society of Wood Engravers in the 1920s, and this work, one of his earliest wood engravings, highlights his instinctive approach to the medium. Rather than be tied down by traditional wood-engraving practices of precision and accuracy of line, his mark-making is free and immediate. A jagged, hard-edged perspective intensifies the scene. The waves breaking on the seawall form a series of varied, simplified patterns and shapes. The elongated figures, dwarfed by the wall, intensify the scale of the structure. Nash’s rough and intuitive techniques in cutting the end-grain wood serve to intensify the image and highlight an artist approaching a medium with much tradition under his own terms.

The Golden Age 18 December 2015 – 1 May 2016

Robert Gibbings was an early convert to wood engraving and quickly appreciated its qualities. He once wrote:

Discipline in art: was that what I’d come to London for? Impressionism was what I thought I was after. I couldn’t think what all this hard labour on wood was about. There was no tradition at the time; it seemed a lot of finicky gouging to get a few lines that might have been obtained more easily with a pen or brush. But slowly a love of the wood came upon me. I began to enjoy the crisp purr of the graver as it furrowed the polished surface. I began to appreciate the cleanness of the white line that it incised: even the simplest silhouettes had an austere quality, a dignity, that could not be achieved by other means. Clear, precise statement, that was what it amounted to. Near enough wouldn’t do: it had to be just right.

The Golden Age 18 December 2015 – 1 May 2016

An illustration from 'Beasts and Saints', translated by Helen Waddell, published by Constable, 1949.

Wood engraving experienced a revival in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s. However, few artists employed the medium in New Zealand at the time. It is one of the most difficult of print mediums to master, but it is obvious from this work that Francis Shurrock successfully adapted to the challenges of the medium.

The religious nature of this work, along with the simple, stylised art deco design and use of line, shows the influence of Britain’s most successful wood engraver, Eric Gilll

Born in England, Shurrock received a Royal Exhibition Scholarship in 1909, which enabled him to study at the Royal College of Art in London. He came to New Zealand in 1923 to teach at the Canterbury College School of Art, a position he held until 1948. Shurrock exhibited with the Canterbury Society of Arts and served on the Society’s council. He also exhibited with The Group in Christchurch and with the Royal Academy in London. After his retirement he worked on private sculptural projects.

The London-based art critic Malcolm Salaman was very complimentary about Eric Daglish's work, writing in 1927: Mr Eric F. Daglish has a place of his own among our artists on the wood, by reason both of his chosen subject-matter and his decoratively individual manner of treating it. With delicate white lines on black, simply informing or elaborately grouped, and some rhythmic emphasis of white mass, he will depict the bird or quadruped amid its wonted surroundings of vegetable growth, so that these shall conform to a decorative pattern and yet seem to happen naturally. The bird may be on the bough, the frog on the marsh, the rabbit on the edge of the wood, but the artist’s graver will be no less concerned with the branch and its leaves or cones, the reeds and the rushes, the undergrowth, than with the plumage, the skin, the fur. And what a knowledgeable master of varied plumage is Mr Daglish […] But how decoratively alive they are!

The Golden Age 18 December 2015 – 1 May 2016

Agnes Miller Parker stands out in this exhibition as an artist who had a natural affinity with wood engraving and ranks among the most talented of her generation. Her subjects were often traditional, featuring living creatures, and her working method shows extreme complexity – particularly in her delicate mark-making with the cutting tools known as burins, creating exceptionally subtle tonal contrasts. In this work, the careful cutting of the individual hairs of the fox’s fur creates an impression of softness. Fox was used as an illustration for H. E. Bates’ book Through the Woods (1936), for which Miller Parker created seventy-three wood engravings.

The Golden Age 18 December 2015 – 1 May 2016

During the 1950s John Buckland Wright produced a number of prints in which female figures appear on deserted beaches. He has given a classical, idealised feeling to this work with the elegant poses of the bathers, the robes on the figure in the foreground and the tranquil setting. Buckland Wright was a significant figure in British printmaking and book illustration during the first half of the 20th century. Although self-taught, he displayed a masterly technique. His detailed work was ideally suited to the woodcut medium. Born in Dunedin, Buckland Wright travelled to England with his mother and siblings after his father died in 1901. During World War One he was awarded the Croix de Guerre for gallantry. Buckland Wright worked as an oil painter, etcher and engraver. He exhibited with the London Group and the Society of Wood Engravers and his book illustrations were done largely with the Golden Cockerel Press. From 1948 he taught at both the Camberwell School of Art and the Slade School of Art.

This subject was reworked for the frontispiece of ' Endymion'- A Poetic Romance by John Keats published by the Golden Cockerel Press, Great Britain in 1947.

An illustration from 'The Glory of life' by Llewellyn Powys, published by John Lane, 1938

Leo Bensemann was one of the few New Zealand artists to produce wood engravings during the 20th century. He was deeply interested in literary subjects, which he freely interpreted in his unique, sometimes bizarre, manner.

Here, Bensemann has based his image on Aesop’s most famous fable, but he has set it in a Canterbury landscape. The foothills and mountains are reminiscent of the Southern Alps and the cloud formations are characteristic of the region’s hot, dry föhn wind, known as the Nor’wester.

Bensemann moved with his family to Nelson in 1920, then to Christchurch in 1929 where he worked for an advertising agency. He attended evening classes at the Canterbury College School of Art between 1932 and 1936. In 1934 Bensemann met poet and publisher Denis Glover and became involved with the Caxton Press, with which he remained associated until his retirement in 1978. Bensemann was a regular exhibitor with The Group from 1938.