Greenwich Printmaker Chris Moody talks about how his travels around the world – both past and present – inspire his art.
How did you get into printmaking?
I have always enjoyed drawing and sketching and I painted in oils until I attended an introductory printing course at Morley College. I particularly enjoyed linocutting, but couldn’t find a local course, so I did monoprinting instead. That took me into etching.
I started as an open access student at Thames-Side Print Studio in Woolwich, where Nick Richards helped me a lot, and I gradually extended my printing techniques into soft and hard ground etching, aquatint and linocut.
What do you enjoy about printmaking?
I love the combination of art and craft in etching – finding an image that you want to work on, choosing how you are going to do it, in which mediums, and then working out how you are going to achieve it. The length of the process means you can reflect on it as you go through and it goes on changing, so the end result is always something of a surprise. I find hard ground etching quite a deliberate process, so I go back to monoprinting when I want to loosen up again. I like linocutting for the intensity of the colours and the planning you need to assemble a final image. Gradually one technique bleeds into another, so I am now introducing colour into more of my work.
You take a lot of inspiration from your travels, both past and present. You said you are doing a kind of “emotional archaeology” going through images from when you first visited places. Can you tell me a bit about that?
I was introduced to serious travel when I was a student. I still have a slide I took of a group of Egyptian villagers posing with my sketchbook on the banks of the Nile. I find visiting new places, with all the excitement and heightened awareness that brings, very stimulating.
When I get back, I can reflect on all that and work out the experiences that have meant the most to me and have been the most engaging. Wordsworth said that his poems came out of emotion recollected in tranquillity. The way that memory itself changes the original experience is itself important, so the eventual image is a record of my response to what I have seen, rather than an attempt to reproduce it.
During the long COVID lockdown, I did a lot of work digitalising old slides as well as writing about my childhood memories of staying with my Welsh grandparents in South Wales, a very different environment to the one I lived in for the rest of the year in south London. Belonging but not belonging at the same time, being immersed in an experience but simultaneously observing it – maybe that’s at the root of my ‘practice’, if I can call it that. That’s what I mean by ‘emotional archeology’.
Architecture seems to be a theme in your prints as well. Are buildings something you have a particular interest in?
Yes, the first thing I wanted to be when I was a child was an architect. History was another passion and the built environment is the clearest record of the continuous layers of it in a particular place and culture, the discontinuities as well as the roots of what makes it distinctive. So buildings in a landscape, or in context, rather than their architectural significance in themselves. Intensely lived-in places rather than untouched wilderness, though abandoned places have their own mystique. I also like the way light is filtered or reflected and shadows are thrown.
Do you have any travel plans for more print inspiration?
We recently planned a trip to Uzbekistan, using local transport and family-run hotels and boarding houses as much as we could. Great points along the old Silk Route, Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva, where different cultures and religious traditions came into contact and influenced each other. This is what always holds a fascination for me. We’re planning what to do next – Mexico perhaps, or the Balkans. And I still haven’t worked much on my memories of South India.
You have a local connection to Greenwich. Tell me about that, and how does that come through in your work?
Greenwich was the place I used to visit as a child, usually via a boat from Westminster. It’s very close to where my where my grandfather had his chemist shop in Rotherhithe, near Surrey Docks. So I was very excited to come back to Greenwich in 2005 to be Vicar of St Alfege in the old centre of the town. I got involved with a lot of the local activities, including Greenwich Open Studios and the Greenwich Society. A big restoration project on the church made me think a lot about Hawksmoor, the inspiration for his architecture, how Wren and his circle adapted continental Baroque to the English context, as well as classical and early Christian archeological remains. It has intensified all my artistic interests, but I am still too close in a way to look at it directly as a source of inspiration. I don’t want to get too nostalgic or sentimental, so I may give it a few more years before tackling it directly as a subject.
For more information about Chris's work, see his artist's page. His prints are available at the Greenwich Printmakers gallery and in our online shop.
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