Latest news with #FolioSociety
The Guardian
6 days ago
- General
- The Guardian
Angela Lemaire obituary
My sister-in-law Angela Lemaire, who has died aged 80, was a printmaker, painter, wood engraver and writer. She lived and worked in Jedburgh in the Scottish Borders. Influenced by artists such as William Blake, Samuel Palmer and Odilon Redon, her main interest lay in developing metaphysical/spiritual themes and ideas, often through combining words and images. She is probably best known for the handmade books she produced with the Folio Society and the specialist fine art publisher The Old Stile Press, including The Journey of Thomas the Rhymer (2000), The Pyde Pyper (2002), Joys by Thomas Traherne (2004), Secret Commonwealth (2008), A Christmas Sequence (2008), Jubilate Agno (2012) and Talking Through Trees (2016). She was born in Burnham, Buckinghamshire, to Derry Lemaire, an army officer, and his wife, Monica (nee Grimble). Her parents had an acrimonious divorce, after which her father remarried and gained custody of Angela and her brother, Michael, emigrating to Australia in 1956. She later wrote about her unhappy childhood in her book Are You Trying To Annoy Me? (1969), under the pseudonym Katherine Blake. After attending Pymble ladies' college in Sydney, Australia, Angela returned to the UK in 1962 to live with her mother and stepfather, Douglas Lyne, finishing her schooling at the Lycée Français in London and then Wispers boarding school in West Sussex. She then went to the Chelsea College of Arts in 1963, and from 1964 to 1967 studied at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, where she specialised in printmaking and gained a diploma in art and design. At Camberwell she produced and printed her first book, The Plague (1967). After leaving college she worked part-time as a clerk while selling her work and taking on commissions. For the next few years Angela had part-time jobs as a typist in solicitors' offices and in art teaching, until in 1973, on a holiday in the Scottish Highlands, she met a salmon fisherman, Roddy Macaskill, and they married in 1973. Moving to live in Inverinate on the shore of Loch Duich in the Highland region, they had a son, Calum, but separated in 1984 (and divorced in 1987), after which Angela relocated to Edinburgh, working as a cleaner up to 1991 and then as a part-time typist at the Synod of the Scottish Episcopal Church until 1999, all the while still producing her artwork. After Calum went to live with Roddy, she moved to Jedbugh and finally became a full-time artist. Over the years Angela contributed to many group exhibitions and had several solo shows, the last being at the HAGB Gallery in Jedburgh in 2023. Her work is in many private collections, while much of her writing and correspondence is archived in the National Library of Scotland. She is survived by Calum, her grandchildren, Sorley, Fia and Eda, her brother Michael and her half-sister Jules.
The Guardian
07-04-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Simon Brett obituary
My dad, Simon Brett, who has died aged 81, was a leading wood engraver, prolific writer, curator, teacher and champion of other artists. His Wood Engraving – How to Do It (1994) remains the classic manual. Simon was instrumental in reviving wood engraving as a fine art. Over the 60 years of his working life, he made more than 1,000 engravings, including private commissions, bookplates and independent work on themes including politics, war, ethics and religion, that stretched the boundaries of the art form. He illustrated more than 60 books, including the Folio Society's Middlemarch, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, The Legends of the Ring and Shakespeare. His intellect and passion for literature matched his meticulous technical expertise, emotional depth and imagination as an engraver. For his prize-winning Pericles, Prince of Tyre (2011), Simon engraved more than 140 blocks, aiming to 'stage the play on the page'. In 1998, he was commissioned by the Queen's Medical Household to create a print commemorating the golden wedding anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. He served as chairman of the Society of Wood Engravers 1986-92, and in 2021 he was made an honorary member of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers. Simon was born in Windsor, Berkshire, to Bay (nee Brownell) and Antony Brett. Antony's job as steward of St Bartholomew's hospital in London came with a flat above the hospital's 'Hogarth Stair' – a grand staircase decorated with canvases by William Hogarth, which were an early influence on Simon, as were the surrounding bomb sites. At Ampleforth college in North Yorkshire, he was taught history by Basil (later Cardinal) Hume and drawing by the sculptor John Bunting, then went on to St Martin's School of Art in London, where he was introduced to engraving. Afterwards, Simon moved to Taos, New Mexico, for two years as a painter, joining his great-aunt, the painter Dorothy Brett, who lived there, then moving to France and Denmark. He returned to the UK and became an art teacher at Marlborough college, 1971-89 – former students remember his shy smile, cowboy hat and teaching that inspired many careers in the arts. By the end of the 70s he had himself given up painting to focus on engraving. As quiet, kind and as deep as they come, he had an extraordinary talent for correspondence. I remember him at the kitchen table, without a computer, sifting through engravings for An Engraver's Globe (2022), which collated 225 works by artists from 23 different countries. Living with Parkinson's from 2008 changed his engraving technique but Simon continued working until two days before his death. Parkinson's robbed him of easy movement and speech but never of his spirit or artistic vision. In 1974 Simon married the painter Juliet Wood, my mother. She and I survive him, as do four stepchildren and 11 grandchildren, and his sister, Vanessa.
