Raymond Higgs – Reduction Wood Engraving

This website is run by the family of Raymond Higgs. It includes all of his prints for sale and images of his other works.

Raymond Higgs was a Cumbrian Artist and best known as a Printmaker. He lived with the artist Jenny Cowern in North Cumbria. He died in 2017.

He worked in many media and progressed through from paintings, through etchings and reduction lino prints, but is best known for his wood reduction engravings.

Raymond described this process:

“These wood engravings use the ‘cut and come again’ or Reduction method of making prints, where the editioning of the first colour is completed and made finite by the recutting of the same block to produce the second and subsequent colours. An alternative name is ‘waste-block’ printing, sometimes described as ‘suicide printing’ because of the risk involved. Picasso is believed to have invented this process. In this little used method of making prints the size of the edition is more strictly limited than other ways of making prints as the block is progressively destroyed. All my prints are in editions of about 20 to 140 including all proofs and are finite. I print in a registration box with a teaspoon.”

Use the navigation, top right, to view Raymond’s work and find out more about his methods of production and what his work is about.