Artworks

Kit Boyd ARE (elected 2024)

Night in the City, 2025

reduction linocut, edition of 25

paper size 30 x 42cm

image size 20 x 30cm

£160 unframed

Kit Boyd's art explores how we live alongside nature in our increasingly detached modern world.

This particular work follows in his series of romanticised London scenes that includes Greenwich Park, Battersea Park and the Thames Barrier. Night in the City is based on Postman's Park where he used to eat his lunch in the 1990s when he worked at a record shop near St Paul's Cathedral. Michael Ayrton's Minotaur sculpture was living there before its move up to the Barbican walkway, adding a certain unsettling mood to the park enclosed by city buildings.

The reduction linocut has 6 colour layers, and is adapted from an ink drawing he made 30 years ago. Each successive colour layer is cut from one piece of linoleum, destroying all that has gone before each time it is printed. The layer order was deep cadmium yellow, pale blue (twice through the press to increase the colour strength), a mid-blue, olive green, cobalt blue and finally black. He uses Ternes Burton pins to keep the registration tight, especially important as he uses his Hunter Penrose etching press to print his linocuts.

Kit Boyd lives in London and works from his studio overlooking the Thames Barrier. He graduated in Visual Art from Aberystwyth University in 1991. He moved into printmaking in 2011, learning various techniques at City Lit and Morley College. Recent commissions include six train station posters for the Darent Valley in Kent, home to his artistic hero Samuel Palmer, and a book jacket for Penguin Random House.