03/09/2026
The studio is officially open, the coffee machine is fired up, and teas and coffees can now be properly served.
In the shot sits a teapot made right here (complete with the inevitable studio fingerprint patina), parked on the coffee machine under a very special print. It was kindly given to me by Alan Smith, my print technician at the Royal College of Art. It is genuinely one of a kind, pulled on a slightly larger sheet than the standard edition.
I learnt the vast majority of my printmaking from Alan. A lot of that education involved "tea drinking", which routinely kicked off around 6 o'clock at the Art Bar. In those days, a proper pint was simply defined as a cup of tea, strictly accompanied by a bag of crisps or dry roasted nuts rather than any sensible sandwich. By the end of my two years at the RCA, people started calling me "Little Alan." Some might have thought it was an insult, but to this day I treat it as the highest honour I could ever receive. If I manage to carry just 10% of Alan's technical brain, I am in the top 99% of printmakers on the planet. Most people never grasp how masterfully skilled someone is until you have stood at the press with them and watched them solve the impossible.
That ethos is what this studio is built on: talking, drinking tea, and making serious art. Thinking, doing, looking at the result, and repeating it until your hands know the press better than your head does. There is no fast track, no digital shortcut, and no replacement for muscle memory.
Just head down, put the kettle on, and get to work.
Pop in, grab a brew, and let’s pull some prints.
