Out of the Wood

British Woodcuts & Wood Engravings 1890–1945

British Council

1991   |  245 × 170mm   |  40pp

Happenstance. When I decided to set up as a freelance designer I had no idea where my first job would come from. As luck would have it, the curator whose office was next door to mine at the National Galleries of Scotland had been commissioned by the British Council to organise a touring exhibition of prints by contemporary Scottish artists. In the week that I was due to leave my job, Andrea Rose – who went on to become the longstanding head of Visual Arts at the Council – came to tell the curator the bad news that, with the plans running so late, there was no chance of any sort of accompanying publication for the show. ‘Don’t worry', she was told, ‘the man next door is going freelance next Monday. He will be able to produce a leaflet for you’. That was the start of a steady flow of work from the British Council over the next fifteen years, of which this 1991 catalogue is an early example. I am rather horrified to see how early I hit the ground running. No one likes to be reminded how much of their best work is done when young.