Coltsfoot

Ivy Anne Ellis was born in Birmingham, England, an excellent place for a woodcut artist. Among English cities, it most fully embraced William Morris’s Arts and Crafts Movement, which, starting in the 1860s, called for a return to traditional handcraft to counter the alienating effects of the Industrial Revolution. Locally, the place to learn craft skills was the Birmingham School of Art, where Ellis went to school.

Her mastery of handcraft is evident in the sparkling woodcut Coltsfoot (the flower gets its name from its leaves, which look like a colt’s foot). To capture this native plant, Ellis first had to separate each element by color, then carve and ink a wooden block for each color. Then she printed the blocks together to form the image, like a puzzle. The white area is the plain paper showing through.