A recent stroke of luck brought Mike Goldmark and master etcher Norman Ackroyd together, 30 years after their first collaboration. In this wide-ranging interview, Ackroyd reflects on his printmaking career and the artists who made it possible.
Norman Ackroyd, photographed at his London studio by Jay Goldmark
Mike Goldmark | Norman, it’s really kind of you to allow us into your home and studio to take time to chat. We’ve loved the work of Anthony Gross for years, and now we look after his estate and we’re busy making a film about him. And it’s almost impossible to find anybody who can talk about him, who actually knew him and met him. I’d love to hear some of your stories.
Norman Ackroyd | Well, when I was a student in Leeds, Anthony Gross was the legendary name in etching. He was the king, I mean the real McCoy, alongside people like Julian Trevelyan. I got a place at the Royal College of Art with Julian, and they would invite amazing artists to come – Piper, Josef Herman, Graham Sutherland I got on very well with. Gross used to come across and talk to us a couple of days a year, and he and I hit it off straight away. He invited me around to his studio in Greenwich: he had Whistler’s old press, I think. And we became very good friends. He got me to come over and have a look at the Slade’s etching room, where he was teaching, which was an entirely different atmosphere to the Royal College. He had a really good, massively built, bluff Portuguese assistant called Bartolomeu dos Santos – he did some beautiful aquatints, did Barto, and eventually took over from Anthony and used to get me in as the external assessor there when I was still quite young. But I remember going to an exhibition in Greenwich Park where Gross had a show on. We were both a bit early, so we had a chance to chat and he realized that I really liked this particular print of a girl on a bicycle in the Fulham Road. It was a busy night for him, private view with lots of people, but he must have remembered because about a week later a mailing tube came through the post with that print in it, signed to me. We continued to be very, very good friends, and we traded things.
Although he didn’t teach you formally, did you learn anything about etching from Gross? Did he give you any instruction?
Oh, yes, well when I went to his studio, I saw all his different tools. He had loads of different etching needles, multiples. And the marks he could make with them, his stippling stuff. But you learn through osmosis, you don’t learn through the written thing. You see how he works, how he lays his press out, how he lays the studio out. He was incredibly revered by my first etching teacher in Leeds as well, who was a great disciple of Anthony.
Who was that?
A very lovely, quiet man called Norman Webster. Somebody’s just doing a monograph on him up in Yorkshire. He taught etching from before the war right through to my time. He was a classical etcher, which, in a way, Anthony Gross was too, but he loosened it up a lot did Anthony. But if you think about Griggs and people like that, Norman was of that school. Incredibly generous. I was very lucky right from the start. The first introduction to etching should be very open, but you don’t neglect the actual craftsmanship, and Norman was a great craftsman. Once back in Leeds I’d taken quite a large plate away with me for the weekend. He’d just shown me the process of sugar lift. So I’d drawn this plate up, which I quite liked, and I brought it back into the studio at Leeds, took it through and etched it. And then I left it on the cleaning table with paraffin and solvent, because the varnish was proving a bit difficult to shift, while I went for a cup of tea. When I came back, the plate had gone. I’d been quite excited, looking forward to seeing what it looked like. Now, as you know, if you get a piece of damp paper and tape it up, it will dry flat, and there was a print taped up on the wall about this size. I must have walked past it about half a dozen times before I suddenly realised it was my plate. While I’d been away, Norman had got a piece of beautiful Whatman paper, he’d seen my plate, cleaned it up, inked it beautifully, put it through the press and taken the most fantastic impression, taped it up, and then just said nothing – and probably gone off for his own cup of tea. I couldn’t take my eyes off it, because it really sang on the wall. We used to have an exhibition in Yorkshire, like the Royal Academy Summer Show, held in Leeds City Art Gallery. I’d never put in for it before – this is right at the beginning of my etching life – but submissions had to be in by six o’clock that evening. I found a frame, cut it down, put the print in it and it sold, for four guineas. It's the first print I ever sold, printed by Norman Webster and bought by Leeds City Art Gallery.
Do you remember when you first decided that you wanted to be an etcher?
Oh, it was right at the beginning when I made my first etchings. I just loved the stuff. It’s a bit like asking a musician, ‘Why do you play double bass or violin or piano?’ This is the thing I can express myself with. I took to etching, like some people do; Hockney took to etching like a duck to water. Because he’s a draughtsman. And it’s a drawing medium, is etching, even aquatint. I actually think watercolour is a drawing medium: you can draw in tone. Which is, in way, what Tony Gross was doing, crosshatching in different depths of line. He’s got that depth of colour, etching colour. He gets the depths in things. A lot of early etchings were just pretty flat, very pedantic. When the bottom fell out of the market after the First World War, there were these really predictable drawings of scenes and whatnot. And Gross started to really open everything up. He brought that kind of classical thing into it, but then actually upset the apple cart in lots of ways. He was breaking new ground.
And did Gross show you any techniques which you were then able to use in your own work?
Well, you learned them from looking at the prints. You can decipher what he did. And then you see the tools he’s working with, and he’s working with hard grounds. I mean, his strength was the different widths of line. And of course, the wider the line goes, the deeper you’ve got to bite it, otherwise it wipes out. So it’s different depths of bite too.
Norman Ackroyd, photographed with Frank Brangwyn's old etching press at his London studio
I think you mentioned to me when we spoke on the phone, was it bear’s breath?
I was in Anthony’s studio, and I asked him ‘What’s in that jar there’, and he said, ‘Oh, that’s bear’s breath.’ Bear’s breath is when you’re cleaning a plate, you can put some paraffin on, spread it round, and then some meths on. You’ve got oil and alcohol, and it’s a mixture of the two, and it cleans the plate out well. He used to just have a jar which was half paraffin and half meths, and you’d just shake it up and then just sprinkle it on – like a French dressing almost. It’s no good just using one or the other. And the trouble with meths is that if you’re using resins, the methylated spirit dissolves the resin and you make a shellac. That’s dangerous, because if you’ve got clean crevices in the plate, and the shellac gets in the plate and dries it makes the lines shallower – the etched line is like a valley, and it could be half filled with a transparent varnish you can’t even see! So you’ve got to make sure you get all the stuff out of the tooth to get a really rich print. It’s a fault that happens in a lot of etching studios. And it applies to aquatint too, where you’ve got these little dots of colophony resin. Paraffin first, or white spirit, so it can’t stick, then your meths to clean the whole thing out.
I think the general public would be mind blown if they had any idea of the technical side that you people have to understand.
It’s common sense, really, if you understand what’s happening. In the 18th century mezzotint plates needed really seriously cleaning out, and at the time, leather was big business. Well it turns out that leather shavings and trimmings are fantastic for really getting the final rubbish out of the plate and making it sparkle, so that you’re just printing from the copper, and no kind of sediment or crap. That was normal practice in etching studios. I think there’s only my studio using leather shavings now. I get them from Smith Settle in Yorkshire, from the book binders there. Beautiful Morocco leather and Niger goat skins.
And do you have any other recollections, any other stories that you can tell us about Anthony Gross?
He had a good sense of humour, but it was quite dry. When I taught at the Central, a few days a week, I was given three days a year when I could invite people of my choice to do a special day. I asked Eduardo [Paolozzi] several times – he was of the old school, was Eduardo. He had unlimited spending power at Pizza Express, because Peter Boizot was one of his big collectors. We spent a lot of time at the Inland Park, or we’d go to the Chelsea Arts Club and he’d buy dinner for everybody. And I used to get the chief engraver from the Bank of England, Harry Eccleston. He was from the Black Country and became president of the Royal Society of Etchers and Engravers. He did the portrait of the Queen and Florence Nightingale on the old tenner, and he’d come in and show how he engraved on acetate. But Anthony Gross would come in too, always dressed up in a three-piece tweed suit. Immaculately turned out – I think his daughter sent him off to work. And he’d come and sit on a tall stool and engrave a piece of copper, and he just went through the metal like a pencil. He’d show everybody how to sharpen your burin on an oil stone. You sharpen it with your backside, you see. He said, don’t move your hands. You just shift your backside and then you get absolutely true plane. So when he was doing something like that, I’d get the wood engravers to come in and watch. Fabulous craftsman. He just did a hell of a lot of good. And he was in the right place at the right time when this tsunami of people came down from the north, in the late fifties and early sixties. They orchestrated it somehow, collectively across the London Art schools.
And do you think we’ve lost that generosity of spirit?
I think our education’s become far too formalized. I never saw any of my tutors at the Royal College filling in reports on me or anything like that. If you were there, it was assumed you had a bee in your bonnet and you wanted to get on with it. You didn’t want to be distracted with verbal diarrhoea. But we were very lucky because the kids nowadays don’t have that advantage that we had. We were no weight on our parents financially. I would never have been able to go to the Royal College if I hadn’t had maintenance. We came to London and lived in Pimlico, Notting Hill Gate, Putney – crackers. It was a great art school, the Royal College, in that it moved across all the disciplines. There were fashion designers, textile designers, industrial designers – when I was there, they were working on the folding bike. The whole of swinging London seemed to come out of the Royal College of Art. They revitalized the King’s Road, which was derelict. We’d have parties at Mary Quant’s and the Chelsea Drugstore. But there was a huge ethos of hard work. I’d walk in at eight o’clock in the morning to go to the etching studio, and walking up the steps would be Hockney and Francis Bacon. Carel Weight gave Bacon a studio in the Royal College when he was between studios, and he was there every morning. Ok, he finished at 12 and then went and got pissed. But there was intense work, and pattern to their day. They were all working like that – Caulfield, Donaldson, Derek Boshier. All in our early twenties.
Did you get on with Hockney as another northern lad who’d made good?
Oh, I’ve always got on with David. I used to go and stay with him up in Bridlington when he was painting. We’d drive around and he’d show me all the roads, what he was drawing and what he was working on.
He’s also managed to continue to smoke!
Oh, absolutely. When we’re both in the Royal Academy, we’ve got a special balcony we can go to and puff away.
I should say that just this room is a remarkable walkthrough of the history of great printmaking. You’ve got some extraordinary stuff on the walls here – a wonderful Hockney from the Rake’s Progress.
It was a good series that. But there’s all sorts of people. For instance, right at the top in the corner is a Zandra Rhodes soft ground etching that she made here. She was a student at the Royal College. At the same time, she knows David quite well, because she spent quite a lot of time in California when he was living over there. So there is a kind of a history there. But it’s also a matter of taste, and it’s a very eclectic mix of things. Paula Rego, I think the first one she made after she left college. That’s a hand-drawn Beardsley poster. There’s a pristine copy in the V&A; it’s actually bright purple – fugitive colours fade like hell. Alan Davie: he was a lovely man, terrific, another really good teacher of mine in the early days. And next to him another Scotsman, William Crozier. I taught him how to etch, and his mate, John Bellany.
The very first book of Iain Sinclair’s that I published, White Chapell Scarlet Tracings, I bought a Bellany for the front cover. He was quite ill by that stage.
We shared a studio together for ten years, John and I, down in Battersea. He was another one, up early in the morning to work, but the day started to disintegrate by lunchtime.
I think some of his work with the women with fish on their heads, they were extraordinary things.
They were ludicrous, weren’t they? But he drank himself to death. Then there are certain prints which I’ve just had to buy, because they’re part of the history. Like the Caprichos here behind me. If I could spend an evening having a drink with somebody, I’d spend it with Goya. He had an amazing, wry way of looking at things. An extraordinary life too. He nearly died at 43 or 44. They’d given up on him – he had an illness that lasted two years in the mid-1790s before he recovered. And then somebody brought over a whole load of cast iron etching presses, which were a brand new idea that had come from Coalbrookdale in the Upper Severn, where they’d revolutionised cast iron. And that meant he could actually do a whole series of etchings – if you just had one press, you couldn’t even contemplate the 80 plates in the Caprices. Then about a dozen years later he did the Horrors of War. And the physical work! You’ve got to remember, no electric light, no plastic acid baths.
And he went out and saw it, and then came back and drew it.
Yes. Extraordinary – and devastating. And then years later in Bordeaux, he did those great bull fight lithographs. He was 70 then. That’s going some in those days, for that physical work. He must have been an incredibly strong, physical guy with an immense bee in his bonnet. Great hero of mine. People don’t realize the enormity of it – all of it by candlelight.
Didn’t he put candles in his hat?
He possibly did. He possibly did. Extraordinary. He’d got something to say, documentary wise. The drawings were absolutely brilliant. And of course Goya made the first ever pure aquatint, pure without a line, a woman reclining. There’s no formative line.
Very early on I had a fifth edition of the Caprichos – fifth and sixth are really nice editions – and Michael Sandle, who we’ve done a lot of work with, bought that aquatint. He danced around my gallery, singing ‘I’ve got a Goya!’ That was the one he had always wanted.
Well that was the one I wanted. I love the top hat – it’s a beautiful drawing of a top hat. But I love Michael. He can be wonderfully cantankerous, sarcastic, vicious sometimes, but he’s got a heart of gold. Bloody good etcher. I like Sandle. He’s a bloody good artist, good sculptor. He’s very good.
Can you tell me a little about Julian Trevelyan.
Oh, Julian was wonderful. And Mary [Fedden], his wife. It was Julian who got Hockney etching. He was incredibly open about the etching studio and he didn’t mind painters dropping in. They lived in a wonderful place on the Thames called Durham Wharf, an old collection of boat houses that made a courtyard with a wall overlooking the river. It was a great place for a party – they used to do a boat race party, because the race went right underneath their garden. And then there was Mary’s Studios off that, and Julian’s Etching studio, then their big living room with a grand piano in the window. They used to have tea parties on a Sunday, and they’d invite all sorts of interesting people. They knew the Menuhins very well, and David would be there and one or two other students, Hugh Casson, Carel Weight, the head of painting at the Royal College, Robert Darwin the Rector, all sorts of people, with Julian and Mary holding forth.
And Julian taught you?
Yes. But more importantly, he organized joint exhibitions for me in my third year. When you were a student at the Royal College, if you finished a print you gave a copy of it to the college collection. But he used to sell them – he’d get people to come in and he’d show them your work, and he’d sell something. You’d replace the print, of course. So three or four times a term you would get a cheque for four or six quid, which in those days was a lot of money. It was a perk. He did things like that, which were above the call of duty.
I get the impression looking at his work, which sometimes looked almost childish, that he was a very bright man.
Very intelligent man. And then he got a terrible nervous disease, which handicapped his speech. He used to phone me up because he felt that I would be patient. Mary encouraged him to give me a call and we’d talk. There’s a lovely photograph of him working in the studio, and that’s how I remember him when he was teaching. He came in and worked on his plate. He didn’t bother us. He had something to do. He wasn’t wandering around aimlessly looking for something to talk about. He was always working.
And these guys didn’t mind a northern boy coming down?
No. They actually thought it was a brave new world. Suddenly you’ve got all these working class people coming down. And it wasn’t just in the fine arts. It was the playwrights, the actors – there was Albert Finney, and into Oxford with [Alan] Bennett. Zandra [Rhodes] was a working class girl from the East End. It just transformed London. But there was a huge energy, and a huge work ethic. We were just used to working. Zandra actually came on a wonderful trip out into the Atlantic last year with me, and drew on the boat with fluorescent pens and things. We chartered a boat for four days while I made etchings of the various islands. There was Ian Richie, the architect, Sir Christopher Frayling, a couple of musicians and a poet who joined us for one or two of the days. I’ve had various people join us, Robert Macfarlane and people like that. All sorts of poets – I do a lot of poetry reading as well, and I’ve done stuff at the Bodleian with Seamus Heaney. I’m really into poetry.
I should have brought you something – I’ll send it. We published a hundred-page epic poem by a man called Aidan Dun on the magic and mystery of the area around King’s Cross and St. Pancras. He’d lived in a squat in North London, spending 10 years writing this, and he asked if he could have a little London launch. My mum had just died and left me a few quid. So I rang up the Albert Hall and I booked it for a night, and we put poets on the stage. And we got Ginsburg across from America.
You got Ginsburg?
I got Ginsburg. And I have to tell you Norman, he was beautiful, he was old, and he was ill. I told him I was a lunatic, but I’d pay his fare over and he headed up the whole evening.
He did: ‘A naked lunch is natural to us. We eat reality sandwiches. Allegory is so much lettuce, can’t hide the madness.’ A brilliant poet.
He was, his generosity of spirit was fantastic.
I love Ferlinghetti as well, Lawrence, who was also part of the City Lights group in San Francisco. ‘“Don’t let that horse eat that violin,” said Chagall’s mother. But he kept right on painting the horse with the violin in its mouth and became famous. And when he’d finished the painting of the horse with the violin in its mouth, he grabbed the violin and jumped upon the horse and rode away waving the violin and gave it to the first naked nude he came across, and there were no strings attached.’
Oh that’s wonderful. So have you written poetry as well?
Oh, no. I make etchings; I consume poetry and music. But I’ve got a head full of poetry that I can usually dig into. Shakespeare, Gray, Marvell, all sorts of people. It’s very eclectic. It’s just what sticks.
Norman, that was fantastic. That’s really kind of you.
It’s a pleasure. It’s a pleasure.
