 | This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations .(April 2022) |
Monica Poole (Canterbury, Kent 20 May 1921 - Tonbridge, Kent 3 August 2003), was a British wood engraver.
| This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations .(April 2022) |
Monica Poole (Canterbury, Kent 20 May 1921 - Tonbridge, Kent 3 August 2003), was a British wood engraver.
Monica Poole was the daughter of Charles Reginald Poole and Gladys Aline Haskell. She was born 20 May 1921 in Kent and died on 3 August 2003. [1] She lived in Kent for the greater part of her life, and according to Anne Stevens "found her subjects, and shapes in the rolling chalk downland, the lush wealden country and the shore line". [2]
She attended Abbotsford School, then Broadstairs, and joined the Thanet School of Art at Margate in 1938, where she was introduced to wood-engraving by Geoffrey Wales.
During the Second World War, between 1940 and 1945, she worked in an aircraft factory in Bedford. She spent the post-war years from 1945 to 1949 at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. Here she met Noel Rooke, a noted wood-engraver. It was John Farleigh's course on illustrating, though, that revealed and nurtured her talent for wood-engraving. In 1940 she had first seen and been inspired by Farleigh's illustrations for D.H. Lawrence's The Man Who Died (1935), which led to the idea of studying under him. She later, in 1985, produced a study "The Wood Engravings of John Farleigh".
She married widower Alastair George Murison Small (1896–1969), a member of the Smalls of Dirnanean, in 1952. Murison Small was a former naval officer who had designed underwater weaponry. On his death on 14 September 1969, Poole retired to Tonbridge and quiet seclusion.
Poole produced some 36 wood-engravings from 1977 to 1993, which were snapped up by discerning collectors. She had solo exhibitions at the London dealer Duncan Campbell in 1989 and 1993. She exhibited regularly with the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers, becoming an Associate in 1967 and a member in 1975. She was also a member of the Society of Wood Engravers and the Art Workers Guild.
Her work may be seen in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum in London, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, the Boston Public Library and in many other collections. Her close friend and fellow wood-engraver, George Mackley, published a book on her prints in 1994.
She was a reserved person and led a very private life. She contracted poliomyelitis at the age of six months, leaving her paraplegic until she was five years old. Further emotional scars followed with her elder sister's death at seven and her mother's suffering from tuberculosis. An extended stay in Switzerland between 1929 and 1931 aided in her mother's recovery and left Monica dazzled by the mountainous country. [3]
Wood engraving is a printmaking technique, in which an artist works an image into a block of wood. Functionally a variety of woodcut, it uses relief printing, where the artist applies ink to the face of the block and prints using relatively low pressure. By contrast, ordinary engraving, like etching, uses a metal plate for the matrix, and is printed by the intaglio method, where the ink fills the valleys, the removed areas. As a result, the blocks for wood engravings deteriorate less quickly than the copper plates of engravings, and have a distinctive white-on-black character.
Elinor Mary Darwin was an Irish born illustrator, engraver and portrait painter. Her illustrations were included in several of her husband, Bernard Darwin's books for children.
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John Farleigh CBE, also known as Frederick William Charles Farleigh, was an English wood-engraver, noted for his illustrations of George Bernard Shaw's work The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God, which caused controversy when released due to the religious, sexual and racial themes within the writing and John Farleigh's complementary wood engravings commissioned by Shaw for the book. He is also known for his illustrations of D. H. Lawrence's work, The Man Who Died, and for the posters he designed for London County Council Tramways and London Transport. He was also a painter, lithographer, author and art tutor.
George Edward Mackley was an English wood engraving artist.
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Margaret Caroline Bruce Wells was a British artist known for her use of woodcut and linocut techniques.
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Hilary Stebbing (1915-1996) was an artist, illustrator and children's author particularly associated with Puffin Books, and active in the United Kingdom from the 1940s to the 1960s.
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