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In her Speyside studio, Angie Lewin transforms sketches of the landscape into prints and paintings with the help of an old press, some trusty watercolours – and a wooden spoon.
Scorper, spitsticker, bullsticker, graver… Angie Lewin savours the traditional names of her wood-engraving tools almost as much as the delicate lines she coaxes from their tips. At her desk in her Banffshire studio, she holds, in her right hand, the spitsticker she’s had since art college and, in her left, a block of lemonwood, resting on a saucer-sized leather sandbag. “I’m moving the block, not the tool,” she says, as she rotates the hardwood against the curved blade to create the eyelash-shaped outline of a petal. “This engraving was inspired by pelargoniums I kept in the house over the winter.”
Fans of Angie’s work might be surprised that she has chosen potted garden plants as subjects. She is better known for prints that zoom in on wild plants in their habitats, capturing their interlocking forms through intricate details, from the veins of leaves to patterns on the surfaces of petals, imbuing her wood engravings and linocuts with immediacy and impact.
“For a long time, my work was defined by the coastal species near my home in Norfolk, such as thrift, alexanders and plantains,” she says. Since relocating to a hilltop between the Cairngorms and the Moray Firth, however, Angie has been drawn to cultivated garden flowers, too. “Years ago, I would never have drawn a peony or a dahlia because it didn’t fit with my aesthetic,” she says. “Now, I’m enjoying using loads of colour.”
Seeds of Ambition
Angie grew up in Cheshire and always wanted to be an artist. Flowers weren’t her first inspiration – “There was a childhood phase of drawing mallard ducks, over and over” – but their structure caught her eye. On a sixth-form trip to Tate Britain, she was entranced by Alan Reynolds’ mid-century Summer: Late September’s Cornfield.
“I bought the postcard and it’s still on the wall in my studio,” says Angie, noting how the dandelion clock on that canvas found its way into her own work.
At London’s Central Saint Martin’s, Angie started studying sculpture but gravitated towards printmaking: “Perhaps it’s because my grandfather was a blacksmith and my dad was an engineer, but the manual element of it appealed.” After graduating, Angie spent another year specialising in printmaking at Camberwell College of Arts: “I like the fact there’s a process that informs the decisions you can make and the image you create.”
The technique of wood engraving still captivates her. “It’s like playing a musical instrument – I’m completely in the moment,” she says as she gouges away microscopic shavings of lemonwood until a pelargonium flower stands out in relief.
This is one of five blocks – one for each colour – that Angie must engrave to make her print. The design for each one is traced and then transferred in reverse onto its block using a chalky version of carbon paper. The final stage of the process, when the blocks are inked and their images printed onto handmade Japanese paper using a 19th-century Albion press, is completed with the help of a wooden salad spoon. “I use it to burnish each print in places where I want more ink saturation,” Angie says. “Each of my wood engravings is printed in a limited edition of around 100 prints, which I do in batches of about 15 at a time.”
Bringing the outdoors in
Every print begins with a sketch. Whether Angie’s in the garden, walking Piper, her Border terrier, on the banks of the Spey or combing the machair on the Hebridean islands that she and her husband Simon have been visiting for decades, she always has a sketchbook and often a tin of watercolours in her pocket. “My aim isn’t to do botanical studies, but to capture the essence of plants and habitats,” says Angie, who developed her signature style after studying garden design at London’s Capel Manor College, before she and Simon moved to Norfolk in the 1990s: “Gradually, my work is changing: I used to do a lot of seed heads and plants in their skeletal forms, but now I’m also painting things in full flower.”
Compared with the purple pincushions of devil’s-bit scabious and tiny hoods of yellow rattle observed beside the Spey, the garden flowers filling Angie’s current sketchbooks are on a blowsier scale.
“When friends first come in here, they often burst out laughing,” she says, walking into a polytunnel filled with dahlias whose pompons, cactus-and waterlily-shaped flowerheads are an explosion of purples, pinks and peaches in late summer.
“People think of them as very flouncy, but they have geometry and a solidity of colour that’s really fun to paint.”
A broad palette
The exuberance of cultivated flowers such as dahlias has Angie reaching for her paintbrushes as often as her printing tools. Having used watercolours only for preparatory sketches earlier in her career, Angie now exhibits as a member of the Royal Watercolour Society. “Many artists stick to one process and are extremely good at it, but I like to mix it up a bit,” she says. “With watercolour, I can depict both the intensity of colour and the translucency of petals, and it gives me a fluidity that’s also influencing my prints.”
In the cottage where she and Simon lived while they transformed an adjacent farm building into a light-filled, gallery-like home, Angie now has two studios: one for printmaking and one for painting. In the latter, with its east-facing window framing a view of Ben Rinnes, the highest peak in Moray, she’s surrounded by cut flowers in rustic jugs and vases as she works towards her fourth solo watercolour show at The Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh, in 2026. The first one, where her dahlias made their debut alongside more muted still-lifes of seed heads and seaweeds, was held between pandemic lockdowns in 2020.
“People said how uplifting they found the bright colours in the difficult times we were living through,” she says. “There’s a lot of snobbery around dahlias, but they’re joyful.”
BUY Angie’s prints at angielewin.co.uk. Visit Angie Lewin: Patterns of Nature at Watts Gallery in Compton, Surrey, until 16 June. The Book of Wildflowers by Angie Lewin and Christopher Stocks (Thames & Hudson, £16.99) is out now
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