Biography
Sara Lee was born in Wales in 1956 and lives and works in London. She graduated with a degree in Fine Art Painting from Ravensbourne College of Art and Design in 1979 and completed an MA in Printmaking at the Central School of Art and Design (now Central Saint Martins) in 1982. Her studio practice covers drawing, film, and print — including etching and Japanese-tradition woodblock — and is consistently rooted in landscape, often worked through extended on-site observation followed by long studio reworking in print form. Her woodcut method is in the lineage of Japanese ukiyo-e and mokuhanga rather than Western relief: she works from multiple blocks, applies water-based gouache directly to the block with brushes for each impression, and hand-prints onto Japanese paper, exploiting the medium for what she has described as 'a wonderfully painterly way to work.' That technical orientation reflects her broader role as a translator between contemporary British printmaking and Japanese practice; she has written on print for Tate publications and has advised and spoken on print processes for the Art Fund, the Royal Academy Schools, Pallant House Gallery, and the Hatton Gallery. She is a teacher at the Dulwich Picture Gallery and at the Rabley Drawing Centre in Wiltshire, and has been an artist-in-residence at the Rabley Gallery from 2013 onward, returning each year to develop a new body of woodblock and gouache work, often built around a specific landscape — recent series include the Isola series made on location in Venice (2016), the Morning Series, and the Peninsula and Province groups responding to coastal and rural sites in the United Kingdom. Earlier in her career she was a co-founder of Print Centre Publications and worked for more than a decade with the master printer Hugh Stoneman on editions by senior British artists including Terry Frost, Ian McKeever, and Eileen Cooper; she continues to share a studio with Eileen Cooper RA and to publish with her under the Blackbird Editions imprint. Her exhibition history includes Hockney to Himid: 60 Years of British Printmaking at Pallant House Gallery (2021), the Awagami International Miniature Print Exhibition in Tokushima, Japan (2021), Against the Grain: Contemporary Woodblock Prints at the Royal Academy of Arts in London (2022), and the IFPDA Print Fair New York (online edition, 2020). She was selected for the Europe and Africa regional exhibition at the 2024 International Mokuhanga Conference in Echizen, Fukui Prefecture, which is currently her highest-profile presentation in the dedicated mokuhanga circuit. Her dealer representation is principally through Rabley Gallery and Rabley Drawing Centre in the United Kingdom, with editions also handled by SO Fine Art Editions in Dublin and the Stoney Road Press print studio. Museum holdings have not been comprehensively published; the Tate's print resources and Pallant House Gallery hold work in their study collections, and Awagami's exhibition archive in Japan retains submitted impressions. Lee's place in the contemporary British print scene is twofold — a senior printmaker-publisher with a long collaborative track record at the workshop level, and a working mokuhanga practitioner whose recognition in the international Japanese-print community has expanded notably since 2021.
Key Facts
- Active Period
- 1956
- Nationality
- 🇬🇧United Kingdom
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
- Subjects
- LandscapesNight ScenesMoonlight
Frequently Asked Questions
Sara Lee was born in Wales in 1956 and lives and works in London. She graduated with a degree in Fine Art Painting from Ravensbourne College of Art and Design in 1979 and completed an MA in Printmaking at the Central School of Art and Design (now Central Saint Martins) in 1982. Her studio practice covers drawing, film, and print — including etching and Japanese-tradition woodblock — and is consistently rooted in landscape, often worked through extended on-site observation followed by long studio reworking in print form. Her woodcut method is in the lineage of Japanese ukiyo-e and mokuhanga rather than Western relief: she works from multiple blocks, applies water-based gouache directly to the block with brushes for each impression, and hand-prints onto Japanese paper, exploiting the medium for what she has described as 'a wonderfully painterly way to work.' That technical orientation reflects her broader role as a translator between contemporary British printmaking and Japanese practice; she has written on print for Tate publications and has advised and spoken on print processes for the Art Fund, the Royal Academy Schools, Pallant House Gallery, and the Hatton Gallery. She is a teacher at the Dulwich Picture Gallery and at the Rabley Drawing Centre in Wiltshire, and has been an artist-in-residence at the Rabley Gallery from 2013 onward, returning each year to develop a new body of woodblock and gouache work, often built around a specific landscape — recent series include the Isola series made on location in Venice (2016), the Morning Series, and the Peninsula and Province groups responding to coastal and rural sites in the United Kingdom. Earlier in her career she was a co-founder of Print Centre Publications and worked for more than a decade with the master printer Hugh Stoneman on editions by senior British artists including Terry Frost, Ian McKeever, and Eileen Cooper; she continues to share a studio with Eileen Cooper RA and to publish with her under the Blackbird Editions imprint. Her exhibition history includes Hockney to Himid: 60 Years of British Printmaking at Pallant House Gallery (2021), the Awagami International Miniature Print Exhibition in Tokushima, Japan (2021), Against the Grain: Contemporary Woodblock Prints at the Royal Academy of Arts in London (2022), and the IFPDA Print Fair New York (online edition, 2020). She was selected for the Europe and Africa regional exhibition at the 2024 International Mokuhanga Conference in Echizen, Fukui Prefecture, which is currently her highest-profile presentation in the dedicated mokuhanga circuit. Her dealer representation is principally through Rabley Gallery and Rabley Drawing Centre in the United Kingdom, with editions also handled by SO Fine Art Editions in Dublin and the Stoney Road Press print studio. Museum holdings have not been comprehensively published; the Tate's print resources and Pallant House Gallery hold work in their study collections, and Awagami's exhibition archive in Japan retains submitted impressions. Lee's place in the contemporary British print scene is twofold — a senior printmaker-publisher with a long collaborative track record at the workshop level, and a working mokuhanga practitioner whose recognition in the international Japanese-print community has expanded notably since 2021.
Sara Lee was active born in 1956. They were associated with the Contemporary Mokuhanga movement.
Sara Lee's work was shaped by the Contemporary Mokuhanga tradition in Japanese woodblock printmaking. Contemporary Mokuhanga: Contemporary mokuhanga (literally "wood-block print") encompasses artists working from approximately 1970 to the present who continue or reinvent traditional Japanese woodblock printing techniques.
Sara Lee's prints frequently feature landscapes, night scenes, moonlight, abstract, etching, seascapes.
Sara Lee is a contemporary printmaker working in the mokuhanga (Japanese woodblock) tradition. Their work contributes to the living tradition of Japanese woodblock printing. Prices for contemporary mokuhanga prints range from $100 for smaller works to $1,500 for major compositions. Most prints sell in the $180–$600 range. The global mokuhanga community has been growing, with increasing exhibition opportunities and collector interest. Contemporary mokuhanga represents an affordable entry point for collectors.
