Swings

Melbourne-born Ethel Spowers, a key figure in modern linocut art, soars in her 1932 piece Swings. The artist’s earlier illustrations for children’s stories demonstrate Spowers’s interest in linocut, but it wasn’t until coming across artist Claude Flight’s 1927 book Lino-Cuts at a Melbourne bookstore that she devoted herself to the medium through which she would produce her most famous works. Flight was a pioneering and eccentric linocut printmaker and teacher at the Grosvenor School of Art in London who touted the potential of linocut as a vibrant, modern way of making art–and one that produced accessible pieces, too. Spowers, the daughter of a wealthy newspaper magnate, became hooked on both the form and Flight’s idea that art should be affordable to all. She enrolled at the Grosvenor School, where she studied under Flight between 1928 and 1929 and emerged as a titan of linocut. You can see why Swings is a perfect new edition for us to release–after all, we believe that art should be for everyone!