Alice Macdonald

Alice Macdonald was born in 1992 and is a British visual artist primarily working in painting and print making. Macdonald studied Illustration at Falmouth University, and her work focuses on people and places she has seen, some of her work is autobiographical (Royal Drawing School, 2021).

I stumbled across the above image of Macdonald’s work when looking through “The Printmaking Ideas Book” for inspiration for this final assignment. The way Macdonald plays with extending the borders of her print really interested me, especially the scenes of these people bursting through seemingly out of the print world and into ours. I’ve found throughout the “Introduction to Printmaking” course so far that clean borders and framing has been very important, as well as allowing the print space to breathe on the page. However this idea of bursting through the boundaries and edges is really exciting!

Again as we can see above in “Friday Night at Trisha’s” the characters in Macdonald’s mono print and drypoint etching have moved out of the internal scene and into the blank space on the page. I really enjoy this combination of using different techniques also on the same print and bringing them together to create this energy. Both prints featured here feel very lively and animated. Macdonald cuts out individually etched images and moves them around on her plate to adjust her composition accordingly (Stanfield & McGeown, 2019). Macdonald comments herself “I think the process is a bit like collage but in print making. It is playful and it allows me to be free with my use of colour and placement of things in the composition” (cited in Stanfield & McGeown, 2019). This idea of creating a print using collage also really appeals to me and is something I will consider experimenting with.

References

Royal Drawing School, 2021, Alice Macdonald, viewed on 17/08/2021 [https://www.royaldrawingschool.org/artists/drawing-year-alumni/alice-macdonald/]

Stanfield, F. and McGeown, L., 2019. The printmaking ideas book. London: Octopus Publishing Group, p.155.