“In which God may dwell”
by Simon Brett (H60)

Simon studied at St Martin’s School of Art, London (1960-1964) and then travelled as a painter to New Mexico, Denmark and Provence (1965-1970).  As Chairman of The Society of Wood Engravers (1986-1992), he curated two major exhibitions for the Society and one for the British Council and has written on the history and practice of wood engraving.  A second edition of his Wood Engravings - How To Do It was published in 2000 and An Engraver’s Globe, a survey of wood engraving worldwide, appeared earlier this year.  Commissioned illustrations include private press books, The Reader’s Digest Bible and several works for the Folio Society, Clarissa, The Confessions of Saint Augustine, The Folio Garden Treasury, which he also picture edited, and more recently, The Poetry of John Keats. Simon is currently working on a series of portraits to illustrate The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.

The print included in the Exhibition is, at its simplest, a visual fanfare.  The images the Ampleforth Community has of itself, or which those who pass through Ampleforth retain of it - both sometimes rather grand - are brought together round that central emptiness, which it is the monk’s calling to reserve for God - what Chesterton called ‘the hidden room in a man’s house where God sits all the year’. 

Wood engraving is among the simplest of print-making methods.  The artist engraves into a block of end-grain wood the white lines or marks, which make up the design, inks up the block and prints it directly onto the paper. It is like a lino-cut or a potato-cut, only more refined. Every print is an original, because only by its particular method can the image be produced at all; which distinguishes ‘an original print’ of any kind from prints which, photographically or by other means, reproduce an existing image. Back...