Coffee House Exhibitions

A Year of Printmakers

The 2013 Abbot Hall Coffee House displays celebrate Cumbria’s thriving printmaking community. Each display will explore the skill of the printmaker with the opportunity to purchase a unique work of art for your collection.

Alan Stones: Lithographs
15 April - 14 July

Alan Stones’ paintings, drawings and prints are essentially human in their concerns. His pictures depict people and nature – but this is nature either as a metaphor for human activity or nature affected by man.

He began making lithographs in 1985 after winning an award from the Gulbenkian Foundation to ‘experiment in printmaking’.

In the mid 1990’s, after a three month residency in the vast open landscape of the Falkland Islands, his prints became much more minimal. Since then he has published a great many editions of lithographs from his printmaking studio in the Eden Valley in the heart of Cumbria.

This exhibition at Abbot Hall brings together a selection of these distinctive images.

Rebecca Payn: Under the Scree
15 July - 13 October

Geology, the passage of time and the changing face of the Cumbrian landscape –
these are some of the themes of the Cumbrian poet Norman Nicholson. For Rebecca Payn, when Norman Nicholson writes, his words are layered with imagery and they have prompted this remarkable series of prints.

Rebecca Payn is a painter and printmaker based in the Eden Valley in Cumbria. For her too, the Cumbrian landscape is important. In these prints her subject is the layering of events which is echoed in the processes involved in making them - paint over printed image, over paint. Rebecca’s pictures bring together two seemingly opposing artistic impulses. She has a sensuous handling of materials – oil paint and printing ink – which is combined with the rather more detached processes inherent in both traditional printmaking and contemporary digital technology.