by John Pedder.
Woodcut print on paper, available framed or unframed.
Dimensions: 75 x 57 cm. Limited edition of 100.
"This is a moment of absolute trust and exhilaration, safe in the knowledge that even though you were being swung around by your arms it was your Mum in whose arms you would always be safe. I mean your Dad will have performed a similar feat on many occasions but there’s a good chance that that may have resulted in your famous A&E story which you love to share at dinner parties when everybody starts getting their scars out."
John Pedder finds that woodcut printing slows him down, allowing him to invest more of himself in apparently simple marks. He has a need to bring craft skills into any work he embarks upon and printmaking, and more specifically woodcut printmaking affords him the opportunity to bring the intense physicality of this medium and inject it into his work. He spent most of his life avoiding the sophistication that experience and refined craft skills will inevitably bring, using them instead to constantly distil his images. John’s main motive is the basic need to create. The subject matter tends to deal with the nobility of life: finding the honour and goodness in a person, a deed, a situation, coupled with with a large helping of humour, then hopefully you have what you see before you, an aesthetic journey using craft skills and design to try to make sense of an increasingly bewildering world. Sophistication is all well and good but in the primitive you will find the real truth.
This work was shown at Atelier Beside the Sea as part of the Atelier OPEN 2023 exhibition.