Miriam Macgregor whose wood engravings and work in pochoir are for sale in our forthcoming Romantic Landscapes show trained initially at Hastings art college before moving to study at Guildford. There she encountered for the first time the engraving techniques that were to dominate her future career.
Much of her output over the years have been related to book illustration, and after a stint with Batsford she ultimately teamed up with John Randle proprietor of the Whittington Press, living locally in the village for many years. There she worked extensively as a letterpress typesetter as well as providing images for their craft produced titles.
She has been a close friend of and influenced by her fellow engraver John Lawrence, whose work also features in the exhibition. In a departure from their primary love, Miriam has also become an expert in the ancient art of pochoir.
Pochoir is an immensely labour intensive and time consuming technique, requiring the cutting of stencils for the various part of an image, each being employed for a particular colour or shade. The picture is then gradually built up using as many as eight or more different stages.
The completed image has a delightful shimmering effect, a reflection of the delicate hand stippling of paint colour through each stencil. Including in our selling displays of her work is a schematic showing the various stages of pochoir magic.