Wood-engraving, as distinct from cutting, is the one visual art which Britain can claim to have originated. Monica Poole was the major artist of its leanest years and her example was crucial to its survival. She transmuted the chalk Downs of Kent, its plant life, its shores and quarries, and the dried husks of nature found there into a visual language of chastening austerity, the beauty of bare survival. “I live in Kent,” she said, “and make wood-engravings — rather stark subjects at one time and gentler landscapes at another. On the whole I am more interested in the former.”
She was born in Canterbury in 1921. Her older sister died, aged seven, when Monica was six months old, just as the family was being transferred to Ramsgate; she herself contracted polio and was unable to walk till she was five; her mother developed tuberculosis, almost certainly as a result, and had to be treated away from home. In 1929, having recovered from polio, Monica accompanied her to a sanatorium in the Bernese Oberland, as an out-patient, for two years, an experience of wonder which she never forgot.
She was educated at Abbotsford School, Broadstairs, and left thankfully to go to Thanet School of Art, but even here her progress was interrupted when in 1940 the family moved from Broadstairs to Bedford. She worked in an aircraft factory there until the end of the war; her family moved back to Tonbridge in 1946.
Her natural ability at drawing had been reinforced in her two years at Thanet. She was introduced to wood- engraving by Geoffrey Wales, a fine though private artist who was the only British wood-engraver to develop towards pure abstraction. Her earliest engravings, committing her to the medium, were done in Bedford. Released from there in September 1945, she went to the Central School of Arts and Crafts to study engraving under John Farleigh.
She began to exhibit with the Society of Wood Engravers while still a student, and left the Central in 1949, making her first and only commercial book illustrations, for Reginald Turner’s Kent (1950). She realised that her work was “too cold” for illustration, though she made a living designing book jackets for a while.
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In 1952 she married Alastair Small, a former Royal Navy commander, who was continuing his wartime work on the design of underwater weaponry at the Armament and Research Development Establishment near Sevenoaks. They travelled extensively, attending trials in Wales and Scotland, and developed their love of hill-walking in his native Scotland and her beloved Switzerland.
In 1959 Small set up a civilian business as a consulting engineer in heating and ventilation and Poole worked with him. He died suddenly in 1969. Sixteen years later, Poole dedicated her book about John Farleigh to him: “To AMGS, this book and all my work.”
She remained in Tonbridge. She exhibited prints and watercolours at the Royal Academy, and sent them to many exhibitions overseas. She showed with the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers from 1957, and was made a fellow in 1976. She became a member of the Art Workers Guild in 1970; and joined the Society of Wood Engravers when it re-formed in 1984. Her work is in collections worldwide.
But this apparent trajectory of success is deceptive. By the time of her marriage, she had established that she was a print-making engraver, not an illustrator. The work of her early married years was neo-Romantic landscape of the kind being done by Piper, Minton and Craxton and absolutely of its moment. Just as she hit her stride, however, in her mid-forties, the road veered off in another direction: that series of shortlived, high-profile fashions began which dominated the art world for twenty years.
All the artists whose language of bleached bone Poole shared — Ayrton, Butler, Chadwick — were similarly disenfranchised; but in her case the very medium she had chosen was actively scorned, so that she found herself advancing into a wilderness. She wrote feelingly of how black those years were, artistically, while she produced her finest work. The circle of her collectors was small and the house that she inhabited — wood-engraving — seemed to be condemned. For much of the 1960s, and all of the 1970s, while she taught at Tonbridge Adult Education Centre, response from the outside world was typified by an exhibition review in the Connoisseur in 1975 which said that “many individual blocks are interesting or enjoyable, particularly notable being those of Monica Poole, but the sensation persists that wood-engravers live in the past, still waiting for the second coming”.
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In the event, Monica Poole was the standard-bearer for that second coming. When the art world shifted again in the 1980s and more diverse art forms re-emerged, she joined the new Society of Wood Engravers as the survivor, the doyenne of her medium. Symptomatic of the recovery were the publication, in 1984, by Graham Williams’s Florin Press of Monica Poole: Wood Engraver, printing a number of her finest blocks from the wood, and of her own book The Wood Engravings of John Farleigh (1985).
A series of solo shows followed, and in 1993 a retrospective exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. These showed that although her prints are instantly recognisable by their subject matter and their intensely worked quality, they are astonishingly more diverse than occasional encounters would suggest. It is an oeuvre of depth and range. First there were works of steely beauty, then a period of aridity, rocks stacked up on each other, shells and fossils shelved above each other in the studio. In the second half of the 1970s, the grave architecture of trees emerged; and as Poole entered her sixties a seeming passion flared around the antler shapes of her Hollow Tree and through the crevices of Chalk, Flint and Bone.
She worked with the close-toned greys of woodland interiors, fallen timber and fence-posts. Spring after the Hurricane, commissioned by the Society of Wood Engravers and the National Trust, was the most unsparing of these; Poole was traumatised by the damage done by the Great Storm of 1987.
Hollow Tree is also part of a sequence of organic close-ups. She was never keen on landscape. Things, rather than space, took her eye. Yet these are not nature pieces; they are “in no way topographical” and “far from photographic”, she said. “I do not want to portray emotion and incident. If I have a message, it is simply ‘Look at this’.”
Monica Poole was warm and enthusiastic but also deeply private. In later years she became reclusive, living largely in one room and, as the after-effects of her polio caught up with her, increasingly unable to go out.
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Others of her generation sought outlets in teaching, in other forms of printmaking, in the illustrational and commercial work which are also a vital part of wood-engraving. None kept faith with wood-engraving as a printmaker’s art so single-mindedly as she did. None worked the medium with such refined understanding of its potential, or used it to create so singular and distilled a vision, limiting that potential precisely to what expressed her own temperament. It was a heroic life.
She is survived by her stepson.
Monica Poole, wood-engraver, was born on May 20, 1921. She died on August 3, 2003, aged 82.