I've always drawn. I've always painted. More recently I've started combining my love of lonely hillwalking in the high places with a sort of fascination for printmaking that my father kindled in me when I was young. I have an eye for things that resonate visually, that sum up a place or that ask a question. The Land: I think that's it. It's that sense of place that, if you can feel it, you might be able to catch on paper for others to see. The hidden whispering inside a wood, the freedom of a passing cloud now gone forever, the cheerful cold-shouldering of a mountain stream. It's these moments that I try to engage with, in lino prints.
It turns out I'm a trained historian. I studied human history for ten years, culminating in an MA degree from Oxford University. Those studies afford me an unlooked-for perspective on The Land. I'm still working out how exactly, but it's to do with how people use the Land, sculpt it, mark it, divide it, make paths across it, and sometimes leave it alone. The history of the Land is important.
Drawn back to art, I dropped what I was doing and returned to university to obtain another MA, this time from Cambridge School of Art, in 2018.
Now I live in Yorkshire, in the UK. I travel to the high places in Scotland and the Lake District for my inspiration and I look at my daily surroundings around Yorkshire for sustenance.
So now, mostly, I am working to put on paper, in printmaking, that Land. The process of realising a subject, getting it, carving its subtleties into lino layers, and printing them, often over each other, is exhilarating. It absorbs me utterly. It feels monumental and free. And unpredictable, like the Land.
I hope you enjoy my prints and that they speak to you. Truth is, I hope they invite themselves into your life, you buy them and hang my glimpses of the Land on the walls of your home. Confidentially, I can't think of anything more flattering.
Prints aside, I continue to work in other media. I draw, I illustrate and I paint. In 2018 I won English Heritage's national competition to provide the designs for large-scale hanging voiles to illustrate aspects of Whitby Abbey, as part of its refurbishment. I illustrate children's books, I undertake commissions and I produce album cover art. I have included snippets from this material on the non-print pages of this website. If you're interested in commissioning me to produce an original print, painting, illustration or something else for you, please contact me by email via markelvins49@icloud.com.
And, of course, you can always see what takes my fancy on a daily basis on my Instagram feed at instagram.com/markelvins49.
