Andy English is a printmaker, specialising in the delicate art of wood engraving.  He engraves on end grain woodblocks through a lens and then prints his work using Victorian hand presses.  He is in demand for book illustrations and has made engravings to accompany authors including Philip Pullman, Susan Hill, Sir Andrew Motion and well as Keats, Shakespeare and Dickens.  He is also well known for his engraved bookplates and has received over one hundred commissions for these from around the world.  They have features in many books and magazines about the subject.  In 2015, Royal Mail issued a miniature sheet of stamps on the theme of honeybees.  This featured Andy's hand coloured engravings.  He also engraved some of the text and a floral border.  The artist's work is in the collections of many museums and libraries, including The British Library, The Garden Museum, The Yale Center For British Art, The Ashmolean Museum and The V&A.

A word from Andy:

"Some of my earliest memories are of drawing and, from my childhood, I took pleasure in both detailed observational drawings and illustrating stories.  My adult work has developed directly from these experiences but using the medium of that most exacting form of printmaking; wood engraving.  This gave me the detail that is characteristic of my work and allowed me to make multiple images; something else that I have enjoyed since childhood.  I like to make images which tell a story, sometimes with half hidden elements and visual puns.  Yet another important childhood passion was the work of William Blake.  His tiny, almost naïve wood engravings to illustrate Thornton's Virgil have influenced me hugely, as they did many before me.  My personal work is monochrome, small of scale, detailed, rural and unashamedly autobiographical, in the sense that I make images of the landscape and wildlife of places that are important to me.  Environmental issues concern me; current work is informed by the threat to bee populations."