Every Wildcabinet print is an archival giclée fine art print, made by hand from an original watercolour on Hahnemühle German Etching 310gsm. People sometimes wonder whether they could find the same picture cheaper somewhere else. You cannot, and the reason is simple. The painting exists only here, and what goes on your wall is the same painting that hangs on mine, carried across as closely as it can be carried. That is the whole of the work.
A Wildcabinet print is not a poster, and it is not the original. It is a giclée fine art print, the gold standard for reproducing original art, and I chose it because it was the only method that could hold a painting to the standard I hold myself when I make one. From the first moment the idea of Wildcabinet came to me, I knew it could only work if the reproduction was held to the same thing I demand of my own hand, which is colour and quality. I spend weeks, often months, on a single painting, and the care that goes into it deserves to live on in someone else's life without losing anything. That is the only way the meaning travels. Living with one is not owning a picture of my world. It is owning a piece of it.
It begins as a painting, made by hand
Before any printing there is a painting, and it is made entirely by hand. Everything in my work lives and breathes the same few things, saturation, contrast, the richness of a colour pushed as far as it will go, and to do that you need the finest materials there are. I paint on Hahnemühle and Arches, two paper mills centuries old, with Sennelier and Schmincke Horadam watercolour and gouache, fine technical liners and Kolinsky brushes that have been the standard for generations. It matters, because paint and paper behave differently the moment they meet, and much of what happens is a physical reaction I only get to watch. Two pigments dropped into a single bead of water mix on their own, and once they begin there is nothing to do but observe. So almost every paint I reach for is built on a single, high-quality pigment, chosen to stay true and to last, which keeps the mixes clean and never lets the colour turn to mud.
At the centre of all of it is one black. I found it years ago, young and living alone for the first time, on a shelf of cheap watercolour pans in a small-town art shop, a brand I did not know. I bought a few on impulse, and that same evening, after the first brushstroke, I knew I had found something. Black has a difficult reputation in watercolour, and I had never met one I wanted to use until that one. It was dense and easy under the brush, opaque as space itself, and it dried so completely that no light went into it or came back, no glaze, no film, just a deep, ink-like black that made every colour beside it detonate. Invictus was born out of it, and most of the Small Narratives carry it too. The pigment is PBk9, ivory black, charred bone, one of the oldest pigments in human history and still made the old way, and its simplicity and long heritage make it one of the things I treasure most. It sits behind almost every dark surface in the shop, the bed the colour is laid against.
There is one place I break my own rule about lasting colour. One of my greens is a single pigment, the leaf-green botanical painters have reached for since the early 1800s, so true to a living leaf that I will not give it up. It has always been a fleeting colour, fugitive by nature, and left to itself it would slowly fade from the original over the years. I keep it for one reason. The archival giclée fixes it exactly as it was the day I finished, so the print holds a green the painting itself cannot keep.
The print keeps what the painting lets go.
All of this, every painting and every proof, is the work of human hands. I am a musician as much as a painter, and I have spent my whole life making things with my hands, my ears and my mind, so I will say it plainly: art is made by people. No AI ever touches the artwork, at any stage.
What a giclée fine art print actually is
A giclée print is a fine art reproduction made by spraying archival pigment inks onto acid-free fine art paper with a professional inkjet printer. The word was coined in 1991, from the French for "to spray." It is the recognised standard for reproducing original art, valued for both its accuracy and its long life.
The inks are the heart of it. They are pigment, not dye, which means the colour is held in solid particles that sit stable on the paper and resist fading for far longer. A professional giclée printer carries eight to twelve separate inks where an ordinary one has four, and that wider set is what lets the deepest black stay deep, the gradients stay smooth, and the smallest mark in a dense painting survive into the print. A true fine art giclée meets the standard set by the Fine Art Trade Guild in London, which has looked after artists since 1910, calling for pigment inks, heavyweight acid-free and lignin-free paper, and fade testing. My prints meet all of it.
The paper: Hahnemühle German Etching 310gsm
The paper is Hahnemühle German Etching, 310 grams, made by a German mill that has been making paper since 1584. It is 100 percent alpha-cellulose, acid-free and lignin-free, with a velvety, lightly textured surface, and it is built to last to museum standard. I tried a great many papers before it, because I had to – black is crucial to my work, and black is one of the hardest things to get right in fine printing. A matte paper holds a shallower black than a glossy one by its very nature, and my early proofs came back grey, or flat, or with the colour gone wrong. German Etching has the same tooth as the watercolour and etching papers I paint on, the same family of surface, and on it the black finally read as dense as I wanted it to be, and the colour came back to full saturation. The first proof I held, which was not even a good one yet, told me in an instant that I would print on this paper and no other. It was the saturation, the density, even the weight of the sheet in my hand. The full specification of the paper and the inks lives on the printing and materials page.
Proofed by hand, on the same paper
None of this is automatic, and that is the part most people never see. When a painting is finished I keep it by me for a few days, and then I send it to a professional fine art scanning lab, the same one that digitises work for national galleries, where it is captured on a flatbed scanner at the widest possible colour range and far more resolution than any print will ever need. What comes back is an enormous file, and then the real work starts. On a colour-calibrated monitor, with the original beside me, I restore by hand, sometimes pixel by pixel, the small things a scanner gets wrong, while keeping every honest mark that belongs there, the paint flickers, the washes, even the faint pencil lines under the colour.
I clean the dust, and never the painting.
Then the proofing begins, and it can take five or six rounds back and forth before I am willing to call one finished. Only then does that file become the master a print is made from. I see every painting through this myself, and nothing is sold that I have not stood in front of and approved.
Made to last, and made for you
A poster is something you tape up and replace. A fine art print is something you frame and keep. These archival pigment inks are rated to last over a hundred years under normal display, on a paper made to museum standard, so the print does not yellow or fade the way a cheap one does in a season or two. Every print is made to order, the moment you buy it, never run off in bulk and left in a warehouse. It is checked before it leaves, and if it ever arrives damaged or not right, you have a free replacement or a full refund, whichever you prefer, and you are never asked to pay return postage on a faulty print. There is no risk in it for you, because there is none I am willing to take with my own work.
What comes to your wall
So here is what actually arrives. A real watercolour, painted by hand over weeks, in single-pigment paints chosen so the colour stays clean and true. Scanned by the lab that works for galleries, corrected by my own eye against the original, and proofed until I was sure. Printed to order on Hahnemühle German Etching with archival inks that will outlive the both of us, and sent to you with free shipping anywhere in the world. You feel it only up close, in the density of the colour, the contrast, the way the pigment sits in the weight of the paper. It was made to outlast whoever ends up owning it.
That is what it means to hold the print to the standard of the painting. What reaches your wall is the real thing, my hand and my colour, and it will still be the real thing long after we are both gone. The black is most itself in Invictus and across the Small Narratives. The greens live in Green Lush and Green Cabinet, and the finest detail of all is in Apis fratris. Or walk the whole collection and find the one that wants to come home with you.