Friday 18 August 2023

The colour woodcuts of Winifred McKenzie



I heard last week from a reader in Scotland about a proof of Winifred McKenzie's colour woodcut Waterfall (third from top) from 1935 coming up for sale in Edinburgh. Like the rest of McKenzie's colour prints, Waterfall  is rare and shows what kind of work from the 1920s and 1930s is still appearing at auction houses in Scotland. No-one expected it to be cheap but at about £500 it was not expensive either. 



One of the big gains in recent years has been the appearance online of good quality photographs on auction house websites. Online auctions also mean that many images that were sold by means of printed catalogues are also coming up online nowadays. This means it is time for a second look at McKenzie mainly because there is more to show you on this post than the one I put up some years ago.




As with Hans Frank, it will be the earlier woodcuts that will figure in the post. To be honest, I just prefer them. I suspect the early ones show the effect of linocut on her woodcuts while the later woodcuts may be more in line with the wood-engravings she began to make a little later. McKenzie enrolled on the teacher's diploma course at Glasgow School of Art in 1923. Chica MacNab graduated from the same course two years later and was offered a job teaching a relief printmaking class in conjunction with the intalgio class taken by Charles Murray. I am never sure exactly when MacNab resigned. I think it was in 1927, so there must have been a number of students who took her class but McKenzie and Ian Fleming are the only artists I know of for sure.




What is interesting is that Fleming was more influenced by Murray and McKenzie by MacNab. She did not take to Murray (who drank) and I have not seen any monochrome prints from her Glasgow years. A shame because Murray was a good printmaker and Fleming did some exceptional work after studying with him. McKenzie herself made her black-and-white prints after taking MacNab's advice and studying wood-engraving with her brother, Iain, at the Grosvenor School.




So far as I know, there are no colour linocuts surviving by either McKenzie or Fleming but I assume they made use of the medium simply because they adopted a pared-down style for their colour woodcuts. Notably, neither made much use of the keyblock while their work at the time had a lot in common with MacNab's faux naif style. I may of course be wrong about lino. McKenzie complained about the expense of materials for making colour woodcuts and said when her costs were taken into account, she hardly made any money. This may help to explain why there are so few colour prints by her; it doesn't explain why she didn't turn to lino instead.





From the top, the prints are Evening in France, Ben Lui (1933) Waterfall, unknown, Valley of the Dee (1928) Devon valley (1937). Valley of the Dee is the only one I can be sure she made while still a student. It is the most Japanese of the lot but could not be anyone else. Evening in France is reminiscent of MacNab and I assume was also made while McKenzie was at the school of art. Whether the early prints are a bit too samey, may be down to taste. Ben Lui is the one I would go for myself. It has also been remarked that her work has a lot in common with Ian Cheyne's but that may only be because both were influenced by the same range of Japanese prints. It has to be said McKenzie never achieved the same imaginative mastery as Cheyne in work such as Beeches at Glen Lyon.

What she also lacked was Cheyne's sense of place. This is what gives artists like Eric Ravilious and S.G. Boxsius their coherence. What they saw around them remains recognisable to this day. Like McKenzie, neither ever trained on fine art courses but had the kind of unique vision we associate with all good artists. I tend to think she took a wrong turn with wood-engraving. In the end, colour prints of the period (whether on wood or lino) have proved to have greater staying-power and kudos. Ironically, I tend to think the same thing about the engravings of Murray, Fleming and Robert Austin. What McKenzie might have achieved if she had stayed the course, no one now can say.





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