Mabyn Trewhella
Graphic Cornish reduction linocuts
Mabyn Trewhella is a fictional Cornish printmaker imagined as working between a small Penzance studio and cliff paths above the Atlantic. Her practice draws on the county’s relief-print traditions, maritime folk imagery and the graphic toughness of modern Cornish design, translating coast and industry into bold reduction linocuts. She sketches outdoors in wind and salt, then pares each image down to interlocking shapes, a black skeleton line and a few uncompromising colours. Across her editions, the same carved hand returns: blunt, lyrical, and unmistakably tidal.
Mabyn Trewhella’s print-world is built from hard black key-lines, slabbed sea-colour, and the rhythmic gouge of the lino tool. Engine houses, gulls, lighthouses and working boats become heraldic coastal emblems, half observed from Cornish harbours and half carved from weather, tide and memory.
Inspirations
- Cornish reduction linocut
- Newlyn harbour working life
- St Ives modernist shape and rhythm
- naive marine painting and harbour folk art
- tin-mining engine houses of west Cornwall
- Atlantic weather, gulls and lighthouses
Signature features
- thick black key-line enclosing every major form
- flat limited colour blocks with no smooth gradients
- visible lino gouge marks in sky, sea and rock
- slightly off-register colour layers creating lively edges
- simplified geometric waves with repeated scallop or zigzag rhythms
- engine houses and lighthouses drawn as monumental silhouettes
- boats reduced to chunky hulls, masts and striped sails
- gulls as sharp white cut-out shapes with black-tipped wings
16 works in the collection.