Linocut
Travelling just beyond Sewards End, now a suburb of Saffron Walden, towards Radwinter, a sign at the edge of a track signifies Hoy’s Farm. Hoy’s was the adjacent farm to Redgates, which Paul Beck and his partner Bryan Cave carefully renovated when they moved from London in 1959. With their cottage in the background, the derelict cart and the Queen Anne’s Lace plant somehow convey the tranquillity and ordered ways of the Essex countryside in the 1950s. It was from the cottage, at the end of Redgates Lane, that Beck walked into Saffron Walden for a lift to the Cambridge College of Art, where he taught and shared his evident prowess as a printmaker, for seven years.
It was the incipient changes in North West Essex that caused Beck (1926-2018), with a love of the countryside, to move away in 1973, firstly to deepest Shropshire, then Norfolk and afterwards to an idyllic Georgian house overlooking the Lake Trawsfynydd in Wales.
Presented by the artist.