Mr Chippa's Dog

Lee FullARTon

The Work

Mr Chippa's Dog is one of the prints from this body of work, pulled from Lee's hand-carved blocks depicting the story of Mr Chippa, the woodblock carver of Bagru.

Medium: Woodblock print on paper
Image size: 480 mm x 130 mm
Framed size: 640 mm x 300 mm
Catalogue: 0038

Provenance

Lee came to me because I had Blackwood and Blackwattle in my native timber range — technically the same Acacia species, and interchangeable in the Australian timber trade — and she wanted her entire exhibition, blocks and prints alike, framed in Blackwood to match the story she was telling. I framed the whole show myself, working solo without staff at the time, and it remains one of the projects I'm proudest of. Lee gifted me this piece afterwards as a thank you.

I loved working with Lee — she's one of the artists from that period of my life I think back on most fondly.

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Framing

I float-framed it in Blackwood to stay true to how Lee wanted the work presented. My timber range is now being continued by Scott Dawson Handcrafted.

About Lee FullARTon

Lee FullARTon is a Queensland-based artist, author, and illustrator who graduated from the Queensland College of Art in 1986 before undertaking postgraduate studies combining her arts practice with art therapy and art education for children. In 2014, she was awarded an Arts Queensland Individual Artist Grant to undertake an Artist in Residence at Sanskriti Kendra in New Delhi, India, where she began researching the traditional woodblock carvers of Bagru.

That residency became the seed for Mr Chippa the Woodblock Carver of Bagru — a handmade artist's picture book Lee spent years developing, returning to Bagru in 2019 to work with textile designer Kamlesh Vyas and the Khan family to have her illustrations carved into traditional woodblocks. The blocks arrived in Australia later that year, with a second set following in 2021, and Lee spent months hand-printing the completed body of work in her Queensland studio alongside fellow printmaker Sara Butcher. The resulting exhibition presented the carved woodblocks and their prints side by side, alongside travel journal paintings and handmade Kathputli-inspired puppets — a rare chance to see both the finished print and the carved block that made it in the same room.