A Playful Departure: Linocut Collage at The Art Stables

This summer I ran a workshop last week that I’ve been looking forward to for a while, a full day of linocut collage at The Art Stables in Finchley. It was one of the most enjoyable teaching days I’ve had this year, and I’ve been mulling over why ever since.

The Aims

On paper, the brief was straightforward enough. I wanted participants to leave with:

• A better feel for the directionality of the carved line. How the marks you cut can lead the eye, describe form, or simply add energy to a print (I touched on this in my earlier post on linocut noise)

• A sharper eye for colour relationships

• Some hands-on experience of layering and composition without the pressure of getting it “right” first time

But the real aim, if I’m honest, was to give everyone permission to play.

Why Collage Is Different

Most linocut work is methodical. Reduction printing demands that you plan several moves ahead, committing to decisions you can’t take back once the block is cut away. Jigsaw printing asks you to think hard about how your composition breaks down into discrete blocks of colour, each one needing to interlock cleanly with its neighbours. Both are wonderful disciplines but they are disciplines. There’s a lot of thinking before you ever pick up a gouge.

Linocut collage throws that out of the window. There’s no grand plan to commit to, no register to worry about getting wrong, no fear of ruining a block you’ve spent hours preparing. You simply carve a shape, a mark, a fragment of pattern, print it and see what happens when it meets another mark on the paper. Move it. Turn it. Try it in a different colour. Nothing is precious, and that changes everything about how people work.

I watched the room shift over the course of the day from careful, slightly tentative cutting to something much freer,  people reaching for colours they wouldn’t normally choose, layering shapes they’d carved almost absent-mindedly, laughing at happy accidents rather than fighting them. That “let’s see what happens if” mindset is hard to switch on when you’re worrying about a reduction print’s final state, but collage invites it in from the first cut.

A Cure for Creative Block

If you’ve been feeling stuck lately, let’s say staring at a design without much enthusiasm for actually cutting it, I’d genuinely recommend clearing an afternoon for this. Cut a handful of unrelated shapes. Some geometric, some organic. A few marks that are purely textural, made with no image in mind at all. Print them in whatever colours are already on your palette. Then just start arranging.

There’s no wrong way in. That’s rather the point.

Linocut collage by Rosanna

Building a Linocut Library

One of the loveliest outcomes, and something I hadn’t fully anticipated, is how quickly a library of shapes and marks builds up after just a few sessions. Small carved blocks, printed in test colours, become a sort of visual vocabulary you can return to again and again, mixing and rearranging in fresh combinations each time. It starts to feel less like a one-off exercise and more like a working method in its own right. I’ve even carved up some of my more textural  offcuts from reduction to include in my library. Woohoo 

I’ll be running this workshop again but in the meantime, I hope some of you take a few hours to cut loose, quite literally, and see where a bit of playful collage takes you.

Linocuts by Rosemary