Print, a wood engraving, 1 of a series of 7, entitled 'Board Games', Simon Brett, 2017

A scene viewed from an upstairs window of back gardens divided by wooden fencing with a wendy house and a reflected chequer-board pattern.

Simon Brett is one of the most distinguished wood engravers of the last 50 years. Born in 1943, he learned the medium from Clifford Webb (whose work features in the V&A collection) at Saint Martin’s School of Art, London, where he trained principally as a painter. He has worked almost exclusively as a wood engraver since 1981.

In Board Games, Brett gives us a view from his own home and a slice of British life. He captures the comings and goings between the boarded fencing: a van, with a chequered flag on its side, which has just backed up a neighbour’s drive; children playing with a girl bouncing on a trampoline in a garden with a wendy house. Explains Brett of this scene, the grownups are playing their own games by dividing things off.

Brett fills the entire frame with patterns and textures to create a range of tones from jet blacks through to softer greys and stark whites. He creates a satisfying interplay of geometrical shapes and linear rhythms from the fence diagonals and verticals, a telegraph pole, drain pipes and the chequered flag on the side of the van which also lends the scene an abstract and surreal quality. The steep viewpoint and vertiginous angles, combined with the blacked-out door and windows of the wendy house, evoke a possible sense of menace.

1 of a series of 7 wood engravings.

E.694-2017