Linoleum – once every home had at least one floor covered with it – is hardly the medium  associated with striking images like the ones illustrated here.

You’ll have to take my word for it, though: without

See a slideshow of Power and Andrews linocuts

the muddy mixture of ground cork, solidified linseed oil and rosin rolled onto a coarse canvas backing – it was patented by its

English inventor Frederick Walton in 1860 – the prints might never have been conceived.

I remember making linocut prints in school art lessons (they were pathetic) but no one knows precisely when serious artists hit on the idea.

Theoretically, it could have started from the date of its invention, but apparently,

wallpapers in Germany are said to have been printed from lino blocks as early as the 1890s.

The German Expressionists Erich Heckel and Christian Rohlfs were among the pioneers of linocut prints, while the Australian artist Horace Brodsky was another.

Brodsky lived in London from 1908 to 1915, during which time he produced several powerful linocuts and also introduced the medium to the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brezska.

A print by the latter called "The Wrestlers" was included in the first exhibition of British linocuts in a London gallery in 1929.

In 1910, the American artist Max Weber created his first linocut from a length of linoleum which he found in a rubbish dump near his home in New York.

However, the greatest champion of the British linocut was Claude Flight, an artist and teacher who enjoyed huge fame at the height of his career but, by the time of his death, had fallen into obscurity.

Ironically, Flight had to contend with the linocut being held in low esteem among his fellow artists who perceived it as a method of print-making by childish means.

Beacuse lino was so cheaply available and easy to cut, it was quickly adopted by schools to teach children the rudiments of art.

The Viennese teacher Professor Franz Cizek was a pioneer of this. He encouraged his pupils to experiment in their art classes and by the 1920s, his approach was being adopted universally.

Flight welcomed Cizek’s initiative and campaigned for the recognition of the linocut as an independent art form.

He also adopted methods which recalled the English Arts and Crafts movement by advocating production methods of craft-like simplicity with a complete absence of machinery.

Common linoleum from household floors provided his blocks and he used gouges with which to cut them fashioned from umbrella ribs and dessert spoons.

He believed press printing produced "hard and mechanical results" and instead simply rubbed the back of the paper with his hands as it lay on the linocut to yield lightly textured effects in which quality and depth of colour could be controlled directly.

The fascinating thing about Claude Flight, though, is that in addition to his relatively late start as an artist, his formal training was minimal.

He was born in London in 1881 and tried farming and bee-keeping on his parents’ farm in Sussex for seven years (his neighbour was Rudyard Kipling); engineering for two years and for a year and a half was a librarian.

He was a mature student aged 31 when he enrolled full-time at Heatherley School of Art in London but his training was halted by the outbreak of thr Great War.

He volunteered as a farrier with the Royal Army Service Corps and then served for 31/2 (three and a half) years in France as a commissioned captain responsible for procuring horses and mules.

After the war he launched himself into a career as an artist, working first in oils and watercolours and, from 1919, he began to produce his first linocuts.

The pioneering work of Claude Flight was continued by a number of his talented Grosvenor pupils, notably Cyril Power and Sybil Andrews.

Power was born in London in 1872 into a family of several generations of architects. He lectured on architecture and was a published author on the subject.

During the Great War he was commissioned in the Royal Flying Corps and afterwards established an architectural practice in Bury St Edmunds.

Sybil Andrews was born in Bury St Edmunds in 1898. She worked in Coventry during the war making aircraft parts and returned home in 1918 to work as a teacher.

She met Power, 26 years her senior, at this time and their working relationship lasted 20 years, during which time they shared a studio in Hammersmith.

They held their first joint exhibition of pastels and watercolours in 1921 and decided to enroll at Heartherley’s School of Art the following year – Power as a mature student aged 50.

Three years later, they helped Macnab and Flight set up the new Grosvenor School and they attended the latter’s lino cutting classes.

Such was their prowess in the medium, that both began to receive rave reviews at the annual exhibitions organised by Flight.

Their collaboration extended to poster design from 1929 onwards, the bold design and colour of their linocuts successfully magnified to form the basis of a series of posters for the London Underground.

Work from their first major joint show of linocuts in 1933 met with great acclaim and was purchased by the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum.

In 1927, Flight founded an interior decoration business in London and, together with his close companion Edith Lawrence, another gifted lino-cutter and textile artist, he designed murals, floor and wall tiles, screens, curtains, bedspreads and even pyjamas. The business continued well into the Depression .

Flight also edited The Arts and Crafts Quarterly from 1926-27 and contributed a series of articles on the technique of lino-cutting. These were expanded into his first book linocuts, which appeared in 1927, followed by a second handbook in 1934.

From 1926, Flight began teaching lino-cutting one afternoon a week at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art, founded in 1925 and situated in a house in Warwick Square, London.

Its founder was Iain Macnab, a progressive art teacher and wood engraver who had been joint principal at Heatherley’s.

At Grosvenor School, Flight gathered around him a group of talented pupils and together they organised a series of annual linocut exhibitions both in London and to tour the UK and abroad. Some travelled as far as the U.S., China and Australia.

Flight taught a revolutionary method of lino-cutting. It dispensed with the key block which, in other forms of printing, lays down the main structure of the image.

Instead, Flight used two, three or four blocks of almost equal detail, each of which laid down an image in a different colour.

Superimposing one colour over another allowed the picture to be built up gradually in varying strengths and, by varying the order of the blocks, in differing eventual colours.

Because of its cheapness to produce, Flight saw the linocut as art for the masses. His vision was a linocut in every home, at prices, to use his own words, "equivalent to that paid by the average man for his daily beer or his cinema ticket".

He continued to teach at the Grosvenor School through the 1930s and he and Edith Lawrence continued with their design work until their studio in Baker Street was bombed in an air raid in 1942. Most of his lino blocks were lost.

Sadly, he did not produce any significant work after the Second World War and he suffered a stroke in 1947, after which his health deteriorated. He died in 1955, aged 74.

Picture above shows The Gale, a linocut of windswept figures by Cybil Andrews. It sold for £13.500.

See a slideshow of Power and Andrews linocuts

Pictures in the slideshow:  Cyril Power’s print of a rowing eight undershooting under Hammersmith Bridge is his most famous. Power was a great fan of the Head of the River Race and the print was made following the 1930 event. It sold for £36,000

This print titled ‘Bringing in the Boat’ was done by Sybil Andrews in 1930. It sold for £19,000

Speedway riders by Sybil Andrews dating from 1934, it sold for £32,000

Steeplechase by Sybil Andrews. It sold for £21,000

The Gale, a linocut of windswept figures by Cybil Andrews. It sold for £13.500

She said her name was Miya and in perfect English – but with perhaps a Polish or Croat accent – she explained that she was from a group of young artists who were setting up a not-for-profit gallery in Liverpool.

They needed funds and were going door to door to try to raise capital by selling some of their art.

It got me to thinking how great it would be to have the ability – and spare cash – to be able to talent-spot up and coming young artists and buy their paintings?

Just think of the untold riches that might have fallen to the lucky punter who bought Picasso … or L.S. Lowry … or whoever, before their work rocketed in value.

Just think what you could achieve if you had the millions to go out and indulge yourself – Charles Saatchi-like – (perhaps that should be John Moores-like) in the Liverpool Biennial exhibitions and then watch the artists you backed become household names – with prices to match.

Or do you agree with me that that is the worst possible way to buy – and appreciate – art?

In my book you should buy from the heart, not from a head ruled by profit and loss. Buy because you fall in love with a painting or work or art, because you cannot live without it, not because you see it as a “good investment” (or worse still because someone says it is a good investment).

If what you buy goes up in value, fine. If it doesn’t, so what? If you love the piece, what it’s worth (or what it cost) is meaningless.

So, climbing down from my soapbox, I ask you to direct your attention to the pictures illustrated here.

Not all of them are to everyone’s taste and not all of them are out of the reach of collectors like me, with champagne taste and beer pocket money.

But what they have in common is that they and pictures like them are being snapped up by investors who have little regard for their artistic merit.

The paintings were among the star lots in an auction of Welsh fine art on Saturday September 25 at the Colwyn Bay saleroom of Rogers Jones & Co. According to auctioneer David Rogers Jones, there is no end in sight to the price spiral such works have been enjoying.

The sale was the third of its type to concentrate solely on the work of Welsh artists or Welsh subjects, but the search for quality pieces gets ever harder.

“We’ve hunted high and low for flagship lots,” Mr Rogers Jones said, “and as before, the pictures everyone wants are by Sir Kyffin Williams.”

The auctioneer is not the only one searching out Royal Academician’s work. “People are scouring the country looking for his pictures, but they are being bought as commodities like investors would buy stocks and shares,” Mr Rogers Jones said.

Oil paintings that were fetching £6,000-7,000 two or three years ago are now twice that and the auctioneer said he had seen one work, fresh to the market from the easel of the living artist, priced at £20,000 in a North Wales gallery.

The latest area to see big price rises at Williams’ watercolours. “Their value has shot up,” Mr Rogers Jones said.

“They were selling for £1,500-2,000. Now people who can’t afford his oils are buying his watercolours and the prices have doubled.”

Mr Rogers Jones said it was Williams’ work from the 1970s and 80s that he most admired. At first sight, a landscape of a Welsh coastline, for example, looked to be painted in black and white.

On closer inspection, the picture was made up of a dozen different tones. “Put you nose up to one off his pictures and you see a merging of subtle tones. There’s three greens, three greys, three different blacks. Stand a yard away from the picture and the effect is three-dimensional.”

Such an example was on the cover of the sale catalogue (and illustrated here). The oil on canvas was titled Caernarfonshire coastalscape with the Rivals and at 35.5 by 35.5 inches, it had great wall power. Buyers agreed – it sold for a mid-estimate £18,000.

The other Williams oil in the sale was always ikely to be dearer still. Showing a farmer and his sheepdog on a mountain path above Llithfaen, the work fetched £19,000.

Watercolours are less stratospheric. A view of Welsh cottages with farmer and dog on a path at Cilgwyn sold for £3,500-4,500 and “Slate Tip, Bethesda” sold for £4,900.

Representing good value is a pencil and colourwash picture of a farmer and his dog at an above top estimate £2,900, while buyers like me were attracted to artist’s proof linocuts: an interesting self-portrait sold for £340 and a Farmer John Jones sold for £390.

Another artist whose work is becoming increasingly sought after is Charles Wyatt Warren, who painted for pocket money – and probably light relief from his job in the finance department of Caernarfonshire County Council.

David Rogers Jones recalled that Warren was particularly adept at painting silver birch trees. He also had a unique production line in an outhouse at his home.

All his oils are painted on hardboard panels. Using a thick ball of string, the artist would rig up a “washing line” and suspend five sheets of hardboard from it using clothes pegs.

Working on the sheets consecutively, he would paint mountains on each in turn, then go back to the beginning and add a lake and then the prerequisite silver birches.

The results were sold in local galleries and cafes at prices ranging from £10-15.

Today, they fetch anything from £300-600 and six featured in the Rogers Jones sale. The one illustrated here shows a disused Anglesey windmill and millpond, which fetched £450, despite the lack of silverbirches!

antiques@chris-proudlove.co.uk

Pictures show:

Above Llithfaen, the most expensive lot in the sale at £19,000

Caernarfonshire coastalscape with the Rivals by Sir Kyffin Williams, sold for £18,000

Charles Wyatt Warren’s Anglesey windmill landscape, sold for £450
(Pictures Rogers Jones Co)

Sehgal’s latest gimmick, sorry exhibition, relies on an individual paying £25 at the shop at the ICA in return for a word of the artist’s choice. The manager of the shop then whispers the word in your ear and you become the proud owner of the work of art. Or should that be word of art?

Word has it that five people have already parted with the cash since the exhibition opened at the beginning of the month.

Word also has it that the London-born artist now living in Berlin has sold one of his “works” to the Tate. It’s called “This is Propaganda” and will be performed next month.

When a visitor walks into the gallery, a woman dressed as a gallery assistant will turn to the wall and sing, “This is propaganda, you know, you know” twice. The Tate declined to reveal what it paid, but it is believed to be a five-figure sum.

Nice work if you can get it.