About my plates..

I have many old books in my possession and many have bookplates in them, looking like the shadows of former owners sitting on their fly-leaf. So, inspired by the idea of a medium that appeals to me as much as a bibliophile as an artist, I made my first bookplate in 1989 as a gift for a friend. Since then I have made a few more, but most of these have been since 2007.

Despite my output appearing to be very small, I can count two professors and a Knight amongst my private commissions and a public one for a Holocaust memorial library. In all of these I have worked in the belief that a bookplate is a sort of threshold, blurring the edge between life and art, the art being in this case literature. In this I think it should be in some way be both a biographical depiction and personal expression with a relevant symbolism developed for each particular piece. Thus the plates are created bespoke for each client, to enhance their own reading experience, but hopefully not also completely excluding the outside world from appreciating them. To some extent the personal symbolism may be lost on the casual observer, but I hope the plates still remain a vibrant thing in their own right.

My pictorial language is a part my own invention, and a part a compound of many influences, some of which have been with me a long time. A boyhood interest in heraldry is still very much alive and well, as is a slightly later discovery of the Symbolists of the late nineteenth century.

The seeds for the ex libris image are planted from a dialogue with the client, with the resulting collection of ideas, motifs and themes being grown into the final plate design. The style of the font for the text and the layout of it are also considered just as much in this process.

My plate designs are drawn in ink by mixed pen and brush work. It is of great satisfaction to me that bookplates offer an avenue for the pursuit of pen and ink, as places to use the medium are limited, and it is a medium I hold dear. The designs are then scanned and printed digitally, onto a ready-gummed quality paper. The computer allows some cleaning up of the image to make it reproduce as close to the original intention as possible, but the computer is not used to generate the design; they are all still hand-drawn images. I always provide the original hand-drawn artwork as part of the commission, further adding to its uniqueness.

Looking to the future, as digitally print processes improve even further, I wish to try utilising another pursuit of mine, by making plates with a trompe l’œil element.