Daniel Howden: Monolith II

About the artist:

Daniel Howden approaches his practice the way you would a jigsaw puzzle - separating a drawn block of linoleum into parts, before positioning and printing these back together again to form a larger image. The end result isn’t necessarily something that resembles a linocut - but it is; it’s an extremely analogue approach and everything is registered and rolled by hand. Like any difficult puzzle, this arduous way or working often requires weeks to complete and the amount of registrations, coupled with the tiny margin for error, mean editions rarely surpass 10.

Howden says of this work: “Monolith II is a lot of things. First and foremost, it’s a reduction linocut of a photo I took at the Louvre a little while ago. I love congested, busy and saturated scenes. As an exercise, it’s the largest piece I’ve done to date and it took over two months to complete, which is the longest I’ve spent printing by some stretch. It comprises of 442 registrations, which if you times by nine (the number of editions I made) means that I rose out of my chair, picked up a print, rolled ink, held my breath and applied pressure around 3978 times.”

Howden completed an MA in Illustration at Manchester School of Art and has been awarded the RE Printmakers, Hole Editions Publishing Awards, the Anthony Dawson Young Printmaker of the Year and the Thomas Sheppard Award.