Christopher Allan

Chris Allan began his artistic career as an abstract painter, before refocusing his interests over the past 15 years to explore the natural world around us. The results are expressed through acrylic and watercolour paintings, and in intaglio printmaking-etching, aquatint and drypoint.

Chris Allan’s drypoint prints are based on full size studies from life, mostly in watercolour pencil. The flora are cut from the hedgerow and drawn in the studio. The fauna are variously drawn from life and from museum specimens or adapted from photographs and book illustrations.

Drypoints are among the simplest of prints to make. You scratch the design into the surface of a polished copper plate with a hardened steel point. The furrows you cut, and the displaced metal ( called burr ) thrown up by the point will both hold ink, and are printed like any engraving or etching. However, the processes of inking and printing soon wear the image down, limiting the number of good impressions.

Chris Allan graduated from Edinburgh University and College of Art in 1970. His career was spent in the museum world, at Manchester University and subsequently Glasgow University.   He began making prints at Glasgow Print Studio in the 90s. He is the author of Elizabeth Blackadder Prints (Lund Humphries, 2003), and in 2014 designed a reconstruction of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s lost decorative scheme for Glasgow Art Club. There are works in several public collections including the British Museum and HM Government’s loan collection.