Daily Rituals with Lou Tonkin, Printmaker | The Morning Walk  

“I've had a dog for lots of years. It means you have to go out for a walk every day, whatever the weather is. You see the real magic, the treasure, that you might not be going out to seek.”  

“As soon as I met her, she was my dog.” The instant bond that Lou Tonkin felt with Moth, her dog of four years, is obvious and obviously reciprocated. “She will stay with me for as many hours as I'm working. She is very happy as long as she's next to me.” 

When we visit Lou’s back garden studio, it is a space that is made for Moth, and that Moth seems made for: even her windswept fur echoes the golden light, the earthy browns of drying prints. Curled beneath the desk, she could be another of the abandoned nests that Lou has collected on her morning walks. These line the windowsills and perch on shelves. “There's so much of outside, inside, here. I've normally got the door open unless it's really cold.” 

Lou's morning walks provide physical inspiration – a spindle bush in berry, a blackbird on a bare branch. They also inform her way of capturing the natural world. “If I were working from photographs, it would look quite static. Actually going out, walking along, means that the prints have much more movement. There's fluidity, a sense of light.” 

It also gives her prints – overwhelmingly done in monochrome, on a flat page – incredible dimension. You can feel the artist is perceiving the world at pace and the seasons from all angles. 

“You know when you see an architect's drawing on a computer – you can move it around. That's what the print feels like in my head. When I'm doing a bird, I feel I can see the whole of the round of the bird. It’s as if you were to tear up all the pieces of an image, and throw them up into the air, and they were to settle into the form of a print.”

Lou connects this way of seeing to her dyslexia. “In a similar way, everything in a print is in reverse, and I'm looking at the negative space around an object as much as the positive.”  She also cites research on the amount of black and white photographers that are dyslexic.   

“For me, working in black and white is comfortable. The satisfaction for me is if I can get depth, movement, and that feeling of lightness, from one colour. That's exciting.” 

Lou wears the Castwork Vest and Easel Top, and drinks From Trees tea made in nearby Scorrier. Discover her limited-edition prints and homeware on her website.