It was a chance remark by another printmaker that alerted me to the Nagasawa Art Park residency. I began printmaking in 2005, many years after taking a degree in visual art and art history and never imagined learning mokuhanga, let alone teaching it. I come from a business background and spent most of my working life running a photographic library, looking after the creative work of other people rather than my own. That is in no way to belittle the student, but it is an important distinction because it means their ambitions for their prints and their reasons for learning mokuhanga can vary widely from mine. By amateur student I mean someone for whom printmaking is not a necessary source of revenue, rather a pleasurable pursuit.
I am the main wage earner in my household and I see myself as the same as any other self employed person running a small business.
#MOKU HANGA CLASSES PROFESSIONAL#
By professional artist, I simply mean that I earn my living from my art, by selling, teaching and commissioned work. In this talk I am describing myself as a professional artist and my students as amateurs. I think it is time to ask why that should be when I find the teaching of adult amateurs who learn for fun to be crucial to my work, my development and my well being as an artist. It is the sort of teaching that is so often overlooked or, worse still, considered to be merely a way for an artist to fund themselves. My sort of teaching doesn’t tend to get described in ‘educational practice reports’ so you will have to forgive me for sneaking it in under that heading in this conference. The sort of teaching where tea and cake play a big part in the learning process and where making friends is often as important as making prints. The sort of teaching that has nothing to do with academic success or achieving a qualification. I want to talk to you about the particular sort of teaching I do as a mokuhanga printmaker in the UK. Paper given at The International Mokuhanga Conference 2014, Tokyo University of the Arts on Sunday 14 September 2014. Printing for Pleasure: A very British Love Affair
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