Anne Desmet RA

Thursday 23 April 2026 at 7pm
Tickets will be available from Firstsite soon.

Colchester Art Society invites you to the Spring Lecture at Firstsite, with guest speaker Anne Desmet RA.

Anne Desmet RA is an artist-printmaker specialising in wood engraving, linocut and collaged print, often of architectural/metamorphosing subjects, for which she has won 40 awards and has works in museum collections worldwide. Over 50 solo shows including more than ten at national and international museums. Desmet is author of eight books on printmaking/drawing and was editor of Printmaking Today magazine (1998-2013). Commissions include engravings for the British Museum; National Gallery; British Library; V&A; Sotheby’s and the Royal Mint. Only the third wood engraver ever elected to membership of the Royal Academy of Arts (RA), in 2018 she was elected an Honorary Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford University, for ‘distinction in the world of art’. She has a major solo exhibition at the Escher in the Palace museum in The Hague (November 2025 – March 2026). She is represented in London by Eames Fine Art: www.eamesfineart.com

A new in-depth book (published by The Crowood Press) on the art and craft of wood engraving by Anne Desmet RA, offers a fount of information, advice and top tips into working effectively in this medium. In it, Desmet generously shares her extensive knowledge garnered in over 40 years’ engraving, imparting traditional techniques in clear step-by-step stages. She also introduces new, unexpected, never-before-published ideas, possibilities and directions based on her own creative experiments with wood engraving over four decades. The techniques Desmet uses for preparing blocks, handling and sharpening tools, and even scaling and preparing imagery for engraving, can involve up-to-date digital aids alongside traditional and non-traditional approaches. Her prints often combine wood engraving with linocut, stencils and other mixed-media methods and extend to innovative collage-making on unusual surfaces including razor shells and roofing slate. She prints by hand and using presses, in black and white and in blended colours. Most recently, she has been using a kaleidoscope app to reconfigure her topographical wood engravings into new abstract compositions printed digitally. All these methods and many more are discussed and explained in clear, easy-to-follow steps, fully illustrated with inspiring examples of her own work as well as excellent examples by other engravers past and present including Thomas Bewick and Eric Ravilious. Desmet intentionally offers a different perspective on a medium with extraordinary capacity for expressing light, shade and precision-cut detail, which can be used to compelling effect in as many different and wide-ranging subjects as there are artists to create them. 

Her talk for the Colchester Art Society, in the context of her new book, will illuminate the finer workings of this historic technique and show some of the imagery (Anne’s own work and that of other artists) that it is capable of producing.