During the eighties Ian made two prints. He had always resisted making prints but the invitation from the Contemporary Art Society to produce an edition to support the purchase of art for the nation inspired a work which was quite extraordinary. He worked out a way of making an edition of 540 of which each print would be unique. By designing a rectangle of collage to be placed slightly differently on each sheet he produced a rolling effect over the whole series. Thus paradoxically reversing the original purpose of printing which is to produce a multiple of a single image. En masse they looked ravishing. The day that the print was finished, when the whole studio at the Megara Press was spread with speckled bright sheets, it snowed quite suddenly after a bitterly cold morning. Outside the great glass walls, outside from the warmth and the spreading dappled colour, the landscape was black and white: the sky a swirl of dark dots, the earth sprayed white. For once nature was not as bright as art. They were sold in sets of six so that the effect of the movement could still be seen even in such a reduced section of the whole. A beautiful line drawing of the intended placings became a work of art in itself. The print was called Phoenix to acknowledge the recovery of the Megara Press from a devastating fire. When we were in Glasgow a decade later we went to the Hunterian Museum and noticed a photograph on the project notice board which showed the Print Room on the wall of which were four Phoenix prints. Ian went to ask if we could see them. The attendant asked: Do you mean the dotty ones with the bits going round in the middle? He did indeed. A second print was requested by Sunderland Arts Centre to finance grants for young printmakers though it was never properly marketed. Ian responded by making three variations on a theme instead of only a single image for a large edition. The separation of colour in these three works is stronger than he had used in past painting and it reflects the times of day through morning, noon and evening. They hint at the origins of Christianity in Northumbria in the dark ages and abstract the spirit of the place. These tall upright images can hang together as a group of three, as a selected pair, or singly. Tall and elegant, they were printed in three different colourways. They have the look, in their elongated motif, of a ghostly figure in jewel-like colours; or of fragmenting stained-glass windows. The print was called Ceolfrith, which means beautiful garden, after the monk who established the monastery of St Paul at Jarrow in 681 where the Venerable Bede spent most of his life. The elegant image hangs in space like some mediaeval saint from a stained glass window which has beamed down into the 21st century. The neon brightness of some of the colours has the quality of sunlight streaming through a cathedral window.
