01473 824212Designer of the Month: At Home with Richard Bawden
Cosy looking sofas, oversized house plants, jugs of flowers, poised cats and an array of farmyard animals all point to one man – Richard Bawden. The acclaimed artist is famous for creating domestic scenes that draw you in to his etched, carved or watercolour world. Living in Hadleigh, he is a near neighbour of ours as well as being good friends with Stuart.
Art and design clearly runs in the Bawden blood. Richard is the son of painter, illustrator and graphic artist Edward Bawden who was famously part of the Great Bardfield Artists. Richard was also a part of this group whose other celebrated members included Michael Rothenstein and John Aldridge. One can also assume that the family had a love of feline company with both father and son well known for their depictions of cats.
Richard is especially skilled in the area of linocut, a variant of woodcut printing. Designs are cut into sheets of linoleum with a knife or gouge. Once the design is cut out, ink is applied to the raised surface with a roller and then pressed onto fabric.
Wanting to make art accessible to all, Richard tries to keep the price of his work at a reasonable level with original pieces being available for less than £250.
Richard has also worked on book illustrations, murals, furniture designs, mosaics and stained glass windows (something which is close to Stuart’s heart after he spent a year post university looking at the stained glass windows of Parisian churches). We have been lucky enough to work with Richard for a number of years, printing his designs on to tea towels for sale in galleries, museums and gift shops. We are currently working with Museum Selection in order to try and incorporate some of our Bawden tea towels into their exclusive range of products.
We asked Stuart what he particuarly likes about Richards work and he said:
"It's evocative, full of life and colour. His prints never fail to delight as does Richard himself".
Richard has a number of public collections at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Tate and in the Queen’s Collection at Windsor. He was formally a chairman of Gainsborough House Print Workshop in Sudbury, where, as well as board duties, he would occasionally run classes. Add this to the fact that he is a member of the Royal Watercolour Society as well as the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers and you can see that he is pretty busy, as well as super talented, man!
You can see even more of Richard’s work on our dedicated Richard Bawden Pinterest Board.
01473 824212