Size: Full sheet 75.5 x 105.5 cm (29.5 x 41.5 inches). Condition: Very good condition clean, colours bright, short tear to right margin. This print is a colour lithograph made by Andrew Hudson. It is on B F K Rives watermarked French handmade paper. The AH79 signature is in the print, but otherwise the print does not have any edition details etc. In 2011 Hudson wrote an interesting blog about this print and others from an editioned series which he produced for the Bernard Jacobson Gallery in 1979. In his blog he explains that the prints were his first attempt at lithography, and a collaboration between himself and master printer Ian Lawson, near Hereford in Wales. Ian had very ingeniously converted an old mill house into his print-making studio and had fixed up the mechanism so that the mill wheel turned his press. In his blog Hudson explains that he used the people and scene around him as his subjects for the prints. This print depicts Ian Lawson himself seated, with a woman perhaps his wife, reading a book. The lack of a blindstamp, edition number etc suggests this may be a one-off which was not part of the main series. It is also on slightly larger paper and the main editions were on Arches paper. Andrew comments "I relish the childlike innocence of this whole set of lithographs. They look as if they’re drawn with colored pencils." Andrew went on to use the colour lithograph method again, for example in "Tom and Mark" , 1981, held in the Smithsonian American Art Museum collection. British born, Andrew Hudson is an influential figure in the North American art world. He was born in Birmingham in 1935, England, the great-great-grandson of the early 19th-century miniature painter William Hudson. After acquiring a degree in English Language and literature from Oxford in 1957 he studied at the Slade School of Fine Art at the University of London. He later moved to Canada in 1961 to study at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, where he began teaching art courses for the Art Department and Extension Department at the university. His painting was exhibited in a number of solo groups shows in Canada in the early 1960s. In 1962, he met New York art critic Clement Greenberg at an artist’s workshop at Emma Lake, where he was encouraged by the writing of art criticism, and his articles and art reviews began to appear in Canadian and international publications. In 1965, Hudson was offered a position of the art critic to The Washington Post and acquiesced to editors’ request that he stop exhibiting his own work. Soon after, Hudson left The Washington Post and became the Curator of Education at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art. This pioneering museum became part of the Corcoran Gallery in 1968. In the early 1970s, Hudson founded the Department of Academic Studies at the Corcoran College of Art and Design, where he taught art history, writing, and Buddhism for the next 34 years. He continued making art and his work appeared in D.C., New York, Los Angeles, Australia, and Germany during the 1970s and 1980s.
