About the Film

This wood engraving documentary film was made for Northern Print’s Glossary series, which looks at different printmaking techniques through the artists who use them. This one follows Hilary Paynter, one of the UK’s leading wood engravers, working in her studio and talking through a discipline she has spent more than forty years championing.

Hilary Paynter

Hilary Paynter was born in Dunfermline in 1943 and studied sculpture and wood engraving at Portsmouth College of Art. She came to wood engraving partly by circumstance. Stone carving in a small kitchen became impractical once she had a child, and the quieter, more contained discipline of engraving on end-grain wood suited the life she was building alongside it. For thirty years she ran a parallel career in Special Needs education and educational psychology, only becoming a full-time artist in 2000.

Reviving the Society of Wood Engravers

By the late 1970s, wood engraving had fallen out of fashion, and the Society of Wood Engravers had not staged an exhibition in over a decade. Paynter was central to reviving it in the early 1980s, writing to more than fifty artists to gauge interest before organising a touring show that has run every year since. She went on to chair the Society from 1999 to 2006 and served as President of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers from 2006 to 2011. In 2023 she was awarded an MBE for services to the arts.

A Prolific Body of Work

Across her career Paynter has produced an estimated 700 wood engravings, ranging from epic landscapes and industrial scenes built from pylons and pipelines to sharper socio-political pieces and, by her own account, the occasional print commissioned specifically to make old ladies faint. Her work is held in major public collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, which holds the largest collection of her engravings at over seventy pieces, along with the Ashmolean, the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Yale Collection of British Art.

A Newcastle Connection

Paynter’s work has a direct connection to the North East. In 2003, to mark the 250th anniversary of the Newcastle-born wood engraver Thomas Bewick, she produced a series called From the Rivers to the Sea, depicting scenes along the region’s coastline and rivers. Enlarged versions of the images were later reproduced as vitreous enamel panels and installed at Newcastle Central Metro Station, where they still hang today, moved to the top of the escalators when the station was refurbished in 2016. She has also completed public commissions for The Media Exchange in Newcastle.

Making a Wood Engraving Documentary Film

Filming this wood engraving documentary film meant a long, beautiful drive down to Hilary’s studio in Bideford, Devon. She was a joy to work with, warm and welcoming, but with the same care for detail that the engraving itself demands. The day had a steady rhythm to it: cups of tea, stories from a working life stretching back decades, and long stretches of quiet concentration in between.

The engraving itself was the hardest thing to film well. The detail is so fine that Hilary works with a magnifying glass, so it took some trial and error to find lenses that could actually hold that detail in focus. I ran a second camera on a slider alongside my main one, so I could cut between the close work on the block and wider shots that gave some sense of the studio around her. I kept lighting to a minimum. The studio already had good natural light, and adding much of my own would have meant faking the mood of the place rather than recording it.

What stayed with me most was how calm the whole process felt. Hilary has been doing this for a long time, and it showed, not as showmanship, but as a quiet confidence in how she approached the wood. Watching an image emerge under the blade, with barely any hesitation in her hand, felt closer to meditation than performance. That kind of unhurried, practised attention is exactly what I hope to capture whenever I get the chance to film an artist at work.

About Northern Print

Northern Print is a printmaking studio and gallery based in Newcastle upon Tyne, supporting printmakers through studio access, education and exhibitions. This wood engraving documentary film is part of the Glossary series, which documents different printmaking techniques through the practice of individual artists. You can find out more about Hilary Paynter’s wider body of work at hilarypaynter.com.