About Me

I love all things Printmaking, I love the work ethic involved the manual making of the plates to the repetitive editioning of the plate, there is nothing better than printing the same thing again and again, until the studio fills up with identical imagery. It feels productive, it feels very mechanical, it feels like a good day done!!

I guess it is a learned habit from my family life growing up on a farm, labour was always respected and never neglected. This ‘keeping busy’ has never left me, when I am not busy I am slightly restless, a wasted day is a day I can never get back.

Of course I grew up surrounded by animals, and of course this love of them is quite obvious in my prints, I can definitely say some of my best friends were cows.

But I also love Architecture and Victoriana, advertising cuts, flowers and kitsch. I love letterpress and iconography. I love complex fiddly stuff like paper doilies and net curtains, I love flounce and French interior design. I love carved antique furniture, anything that is slightly over the top in flamboyance. Heavy embroidered Victorian curtains lined with a bobble fringe. I love odd curios and have been given lots of weird bits and pieces by those who know me well, taxidermy and bits of old pottery, ancient things, fossils and hand written manuscripts, I love it all.

I also love the macabre, relics, and wedding domes. I love antique junk shops and retro pattern, typography and letterpress. I love black and white films and period dramas. I love T.V! I love village traditions and old fashioned toys. I love walking with my dog for miles and miles or just to the pub with him. I love old things in general, I have a belief that there is a spirit in all these things and that they hold imprints of past lives, a dint in the floorboards where we fell, a finger print on a white wall of a gallery…. I love all of that, leaving history for others to find, or not find but are there never the less.

I live and work from my home in Lincoln, sometimes it is hard not to work when all is at my fingertips, I am well known for my huge output but perhaps the convenience of the studio helps to explain it. I have never been one to just sit and watch T.V. instead, I listen whilst making stuff!! And that is what I enjoy, hoping one day I might make that one big thing and leave a mark.

Although a Printmaker predominantly, I also love to design things!! As such a separate web shop has developed and in it is my Designed With Love Products, products that are not prints on paper but home wares and stuff that I just wanted to make. I was very dubious about the name but was swept away with the simple fact that I had to choose something and this was available which according to my website man was quite a miracle, so with very little forethought it was done, after all that was another thing ticked of the huge web designing to do list! So here we are, two areas, one Alison Read Printmaker where you can find my printmaking on paper, and the other, Designed with Love for everything else.