Printmaking Today
Printmaking Today is a British quarterly magazine for artist-printmakers, published in London by Cello Press. Founded by Rosemary Simmons in 1990, with its first issues appearing in 1991, it has provided a dedicated voice for printmakers since the early 1990s, publishing artist profiles, technical and practical features, news, exhibition and book reviews, and opportunities for artists. Released four times a year, it is read by artist-printmakers, their suppliers, teachers and students of art and design, museum and gallery visitors and print collectors, and it argues a case its editors have made for three decades: that printmaking is an original art form, equal in status to the other visual arts.
Founded by Rosemary Simmons
Printmaking Today's founder and first editor, Rosemary Simmons, an honorary member of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, set the magazine up using her own funds after being refused help from the Arts Council. A modest grant from the Henry Moore Foundation supported the first issue, and help came from printmakers and collectors who recognised the need for the title. The Cello Press history dates the founding to 1990, with early issues following in 1991; surviving sets of back issues begin with numbers from 1991, the magazine's first full year of publication.
The need Simmons identified was real. Printmaking was widely practised in art schools, open-access studios and artists' workshops across Britain, yet it received a fraction of the critical and media attention given to painting and sculpture, and prints were too often treated as reproductions rather than original works. A quarterly journal of contemporary international graphic art, written from inside the discipline, could review exhibitions seriously, publish technique in depth and profile artists whose primary medium was the printed image.
Roger Farrand and the Farrand Press years
The magazine's survival owed much to publisher Roger Anthony Farrand. Introduced to Simmons by Anthony Dyson shortly after the launch, Farrand brought professional publishing expertise from a long career that began at Reader's Digest in 1957 and continued at Academic Press in London, where he rose to managing director and built a list of fifty academic journals. Applying that experience to a small art quarterly, he first supported Simmons as publisher, then, after the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers' council arranged a blanket subscription for its members during Jennifer Hall's presidency, the magazine began to flourish.
Farrand and Simmons enlarged the title's quality and readership together until she was able to retire and he became its owner, publishing it through Farrand Press in London. He appointed the engraver Anne Desmet as editor, under whom the journal expanded further. In 2000 Farrand sold the title to Nick Gingell of Cello Press and retired; he died in September 2020, aged eighty-six, and his obituary in Printmaking Today itself recorded the debt the magazine owed him. Cello Press has published Printmaking Today ever since.
Anne Desmet and the editorial argument
Anne Desmet, a Royal Academician and fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, gave the magazine an editor who was herself a distinguished practitioner. Born in Liverpool in 1964, Desmet trained at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford and took a postgraduate diploma in printmaking at the Central School of Art and Design in London. Elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers and a member of the Society of Wood Engravers in 1991, she taught wood engraving at the Royal Academy Schools, the Ruskin School and Middlesex University, and exhibited in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition ten times from 1990, besides numerous selected shows worldwide.
Under Desmet, the magazine imaginatively expanded while pressing its central argument, that printmaking is an original art form equal in status to painting, sculpture and photography. That was more than a slogan: it shaped commissioning, favouring artists who conceive work for print media, processes whose marks cannot be made any other way, and critical writing that judged prints by the standards of contemporary art rather than as a technical sideline.
What each issue contains
Printmaking Today is devoted to features on the best artists' prints, books and multiples, combining news, reviews of the latest work, practical and technical advice, and information on exhibitions and opportunities in the printmaking world. Artist profiles aim to get to the heart of a maker's work: not only how a print is made, but why, and how the artist has contributed to the genre. Profiles cover living artists and significant figures from the past, examining the person as well as the influence of their work on others.
The range of processes covered is deliberately wide. Traditional intaglio, etching, engraving, woodcut, linocut, lithography and screenprinting appear alongside artists' books, multiples, graffiti and street art, digital and even 3D work. Technical features serve practising printmakers who need reliable guidance on materials and methods, while exhibition and book reviews serve collectors and curators deciding what to see and acquire. Opportunities listings, competitions, residencies, open submissions and courses, connect readers to the working infrastructure of the discipline.
A quarterly for a working community
The magazine's own description of its market defines its community precisely: it sells to artist-printmakers, their suppliers, teachers and students of art and design, visitors to museums and galleries, and print collectors. That is a small but complete ecosystem. The artist needs the supplier's inks, papers and presses; the student needs the teacher and the open-access studio; the collector needs the gallery exhibition; and all of them need a publication that takes their shared art form seriously.
Quarterly publication suits that ecosystem. Printmaking is slow art: plates are etched, stones grained, blocks cut and editions printed over weeks, and exhibitions are planned seasons ahead. Four carefully produced issues a year, in spring, summer, autumn and winter, allow long profiles and considered reviews rather than hurried news, and each issue becomes a reference kept in studios and workshops. Subscriptions are sold internationally, with single issues and annual subscriptions distributed worldwide from the United Kingdom.
Printmaking Today's wider team
The editors' page maintained by Cello Press records the blend of practice and publishing behind the title. Alongside Desmet, editor and writer Michael Sims, born on the Wirral in 1964 and an English graduate of Worcester College, Oxford, brought experience as an editor, writer and reviewer for numerous magazines and newspapers, as co-founder and editor of a quarterly magazine of contemporary art, illustration, fiction and poetry, and as publishing manager for the Poetry Society. Contributors across the magazine's history have included printmakers, curators and critics whose own work has received awards and entered national and international collections.
That practitioner-led model distinguishes specialist art publishing at its best. Technique is described by people who have stood at a press; exhibitions are reviewed by people who understand what a difficult process makes possible, or impossible; and historical features draw on a community, the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, the Society of Wood Engravers, the Printmakers Council and others, whose members are both subjects and readers.
Printmaking in Britain and the magazine's role
British printmaking has deep institutional roots: the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, founded in the nineteenth century as a society of painter-etchers; the annual exhibitions and open competitions; the network of open-access print studios in cities across the country; and major museum print rooms. Printmaking Today reports across that landscape and beyond it internationally, treating contemporary international graphic art as its territory, as its early issues described it.
The magazine's role within that landscape is connective and critical. It announces and reviews the exhibitions through which reputations are made, publishes the technical knowledge through which skills are transmitted, and profiles the artists through whom the discipline renews itself. For art students, a subscription is an education in what a career in print can look like. For collectors, it is a guide to a field in which fine editions remain among the most accessible forms of original art to buy.
Continuity under Cello Press
Under Nick Gingell's Cello Press, Printmaking Today has maintained its quarterly schedule, its London production and its founding mission into a fourth decade. The publishing context has changed around it: print studios now promote workshops through social media, artists sell editions online, and digital processes have joined the traditional media the magazine has always covered. Printmaking Today has treated those developments as subjects rather than threats, featuring digital and street-based practices alongside engraving and etching, consistent with its founders' international and contemporary remit.
Continuity has value in a discipline built on inherited technique. A magazine founded in 1990 that still reviews, profiles and instructs in the same spirit provides a thread through which younger printmakers can discover the artists, debates and standards of the generation before them, just as its complete run of back issues documents British and international printmaking since the early 1990s.
Why Printmaking Today matters
Printmaking Today's importance is out of proportion to its niche. It was founded with an editor's own money and a small foundation grant because no public funder would back it, sustained by a career publisher who believed a specialist art quarterly could flourish, and edited by leading practitioners who used it to argue for their art form's equality. Few magazines can trace so direct a line from founding conviction to lasting influence.
For World News Media's readers, the practical facts are these: Printmaking Today is a quarterly, London-produced magazine, founded by Rosemary Simmons in 1990 and published by Cello Press, covering techniques, artists, exhibitions, books and opportunities for printmakers and print lovers worldwide. For the printmaking community, it is something simpler and rarer: its own magazine, still arguing, four times a year, that a print is not a copy of art. It is art.
