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DALBEATTIE | DUMFRIES | THORNHILL | NEWTON STEWART | PORTPATRICK
GREIS
Cottish tists on W ords are a key feature of many original prints by artist Colin Blanchard and it was his eye for typography that drew his attention to a rustic headstone in a remote churchyard near his Annandale home.
"There is just something beautiful about that particular stone," he says. "I'm always struck by it when we walk the dog up there. "I often use hand carved lettering as part of my original lino cut prints and I noticed the simple beauty of this memorial. I thought the style would suit my work."
Having posted on his blog about making linocuts of the carved lettering on the 284-year-old stone - which lies in the secluded Old Kirkconnel Kirk churchyard at Springkell near Eaglesfield - Colin was contacted by graphic designer and typographer Patrick Molloy, from Dorset, who has since developed the text into a digital typeface, named
Coulthard, after the family whose gravestone was the inspiration.
"Colin's artistic curiosity made him notice, and crucially photograph, the headstone," says Patrick. "As soon as I saw that, and some of Colin's letterforms, I recognised
'I love the trepidation of printmaking. One slip of the gouge and you've lost it. No print I've made has ever been what I intended it to be. You can make marks that are not possible with any other medium,' says printmaker Colin Blanchard, who tells Carol Hogarth about his work, his artistic curiosity and journey into printing and how his fascination for an historic gravestone led to the creation of a new typeface
PHOTOGRAPHY ALLAN DEVLIN.
IMAGES FROM COLIN BLANCHARD'S COLLECTION.
Above: 'I am The One' linocut and screenprint Below: 'Nuthatch' screenprint that something magical was happening."
Colin says it looks like the text was initially hand chalked onto the stone, with no compositional planning as some of the words fall off the end of lines or are crammed in.
"It seems to me that the carver may have simply copied a list of words and dates given to him by someone more literate. It does have a particular beauty in its ow simplicity."
Deciding to extract the basics of a low "useable font" from the headstone to use in his own work, Colin says the linocuts of the letterforms were tricky but one beautiful
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CMAU
"There's nothing like the delight of first lifting the paper or screen to see what you've got, see it come to life' experience before he and his now wife Heather, a painter he met at Wolverhampton, both headed to London.
While Heather studied in Chelsea, Colin attended college in Walthamstow: "I was into printmaking by then and it was one of the few colleges doing that. The craft, the hands-on element, the technology side of things really appealed to me and there's a camaraderie among printmakers, they often see themselves as outsiders.
"I love the trepidation of printmaking. One slip of the gouge [in lino cutting] and you've lost it. No print I've made has ever been what I intended it to be. You can make marks that are not possible with any other medium. "There's nothing like the delight of first lifting the paper or screen to see what you've got, see it come to life."
Colin then completed a postgraduate diploma through researching colour reproduction in screen printing and learning about commercial printing.
After a spell teaching part time and working as a visiting lecturer, he and Heather moved to North Essex to go into business with another couple, which didn't work out. He took work milking on dairy farms and gamekeeping, taught printmaking in Colchester and then became production manager and graphic designer for a commercial screen-printing factory. The couple's next move was to North Wales where Colin, with his teaching qualification, >
The Coulthard gravestone has been another fascinating project which Colin describes as "a true meeting of minds" - his own, Patrick's and the original stonemason's "three hands-on creative people who have made this modern typeface together. "It's a story about breathing new life into beautiful, distinctive, vernacular typography, which other people would have walked past, without even a glance," he says. *The Coulthard typeface is available from Monotype on their MyFonts platform at: www.myfonts.com/ collections/coulthard-font-rocket-88- foundry
*Find out more about Colin's work at www.colinblanchard.com
Dumfries & Galloway Life