Jane Cradock-Watson
I have been painting and drawing for as long as I can remember and never really wanted to do anything else in life. I studied Graphic Design and Illustration at what is now Kingston University. Printmaking was an essential part of the Illustration course and my three years there instilled a love of print. After graduating I worked successfully for twenty five years as a freelance illustrator. I worked on all sorts of jobs, with design agencies, publishers, magazine art editors and television, illustrating everything from apple pie packaging for Marks and Spencer to books on subjects as varied as “Diggers and Dumpers’ for children as well as Tantric sex and the Karma Sutra for adults! In my spare time I went to etching classes at Richmond Adult College to keep up with my printmaking.
After about fifteen years of freelance work I was asked to do some teaching, which I found I thoroughly enjoyed. This led me, a few years later, into completing a PGCE and more teaching in Further and Adult Education. At the time I thought this might be a more regular form of employment to supplement my freelance work. However, the teaching soon took over and the organisational and personal skills necessary for illustration proved invaluable in a teaching scenario. After two years I ended up working full time as a Head of Department. I soon moved on to teaching and management at a University. The University gave me the space and unparalleled resources to take up printmaking again and paid for me to do an MA in Book Arts at Camberwell. This was a turning point creatively, in that I started to make more conceptual work beyond the often decorative limits of commercial illustration. Since retiring from my full time academic post I now spend much of my time concentrating on developing my own work.
My work has been primarily focused on the conceptualisation of the garden and the landscape, taking the form of handmade prints and artists books. More latterly I have been making work which is more focussed on a sense of place and the domestic and often reflects my illustrative background. I am interested in the haptic nature of printmaking and artists books. Detail and materiality are a key characteristics of my work. I like to utilise the material properties of different papers and physical layers of printmaking to explore the often hidden layers of narrative within an image or book. I like to use a range of print processes, from photopolymer to etched lino, woodcut and collagraph, often combining processes within one print.
I am part of a group of Illustrators who draw on location in London once a month and also a group of Book artists who meet and exhibit together. I have also started making ceramics recently and found that this and regular drawing all feeds into my prints and book works.
I exhibit both my prints and artists books regularly at venues such as the Small Publishers fair, the Bristol Artists Book Event, the Upright Gallery Edinburgh, the Watts Gallery, The Oxo Gallery, and RE Printmakers ‘Small but Mighty’ print exhibition at the Bankside Gallery. My artists books are held in major private and public collections in both the UK and Internationally including the Yale Collection of British Art, Tate Britain, the Bodleian Library and the V&A.
