Published Issue 147, March 2026
North East England’s Christopher “Christophski” Parkin never set out to become an artist. An accountant by day and musician for fun, he rediscovered drawing during the 2020 lockdown, quickly growing a daily ritual into something entirely unexpected.
Experimenting across artistic mediums with a spirit of curiosity, Christophski found linocut, or perhaps linocut found him, through an art subscription box. And the rest was history. He developed a distinctive style that blends bold relief printing with playful nods to folklore, film, music, pop culture, and the simple moments in life, creating work he enjoys making and that others enjoy in turn.
He is now celebrating his first solo exhibition, Introducing Christophski, at the Heart of The Tribe Gallery in Glastonbury, England, and took time out for us to reflect on this serendipitous journey and what this milestone means for him.
You’re a lifelong doodler and musician who only started making art seriously again during the pandemic, leading you to discover linocut. How did you take the leap to start creating? And how did you stay motivated through all the learning curves, artistic blocks and daily ups and downs of life?
I absolutely did not start out with any great ambitions to make “art” or to be creative, and I feel like this is an amazing “thing” that has happened to me, which evolved during lockdown.
We were trying to keep our young kids entertained, educated and motivated whilst also working full-time from home when my wife came across an art challenge with a new prompt each day. That seemed like a great addition to the daily routine to give the kids another thing to keep them busy. My wife and I joined in to help motivate them and we’d all compare and talk about what we’d drawn. I was soon hooked and looked forward to the next prompt as soon as I’d finished the current one. Before long I found myself eagerly checking my phone at midnight to see what had been posted for the next day’s prompt. I continued taking part long after the kids lost interest and I became part of a fantastic little online community, many of whom I remain friends with. However, the prompt has long since become defunct and sadly, that particular community is no longer as active as it once was. Though I continue to regularly take part in the Drawingskool weekly prompt, which is another fantastic little online community.
I relearned how to draw and began experimenting with painting, which I’d never really done before, and ended up signing up for a quarterly art materials subscription. What initially kept me motivated was an extraordinarily supportive online community, the challenge of trying to create everyday, and also a sense of friendly competition and camaraderie with a chap who has become a very close friend. We now take the time to meet up with each other in person, despite living at opposite ends of the country. I also started to develop a sense of purpose from being creative which I really hadn’t expected.
In the early days I didn’t suffer from creative blocks particularly as I didn’t take it too seriously or feel like there was much at stake. At worst, if one day I didn’t feel particularly excited about a prompt, I would do a quick doodle to mentally “tick the box” and move on. But after a while, I started to enjoy finding different or alternative takes on a prompt, sometimes finding ways to subvert it, and bizarrely, I found a bit of a crutch in incorporating a cartoon King Kong into my pictures. This came about after drawing Kong as part of my response to an “Empire State Building” prompt. The following day I was met with the prompt “pea pod” which was much less exciting. So I drew a picture of a gorilla bursting out of a pea pod. That then resulted in a series of silly Kong drawings whenever I didn’t like the prompt. I do something similar now to help get my creativity flowing, but it’s not Kong so often these days. I now tend to riff on themes such as tentacles, Baba Yaga or ghosts.
Bring us back to the first time you carved into lino.
This was at the very end of September 2020. I’d received a linocut starter set as part of the quarterly subscription and I pretty much instantly fell in love with the process. My first design turned out to be what I now realise was a quite ambitious, red and black jigsaw block (a lino block cut into more than one piece so different colours can be applied to each piece with the block put back together for printing), featuring, of course, Kong.
I didn’t quite know what I was doing but it seems I had an intuitive grasp of it. I got an overwhelmingly positive response from my little online community when I posted my first print, which seemed to go beyond the polite pat on the back for having had a go, and it really blew me away. I didn’t switch to lino exclusively straight away, but I found myself increasingly drawn to it. By March 2021, I had pretty much decided that lino was my thing and abandoned all other mediums.
There’s something risky about printmaking. It’s a notoriously hard to master craft as the outcome never promises perfection. How do you feel about this in approaching a piece? And what’s it like to experience the final pressing of a print?
I try not to overthink printmaking, and it helps if you can be fluid with the design and roll with any minor errors. Unless it’s something glaringly obvious, nobody else necessarily knows what you intended to do. That doesn’t mean I haven’t had any disasters however. But thankfully, there have been relatively few from which I have been unable to recover.
Owing to the relatively expensive nature of the material, I realised that if I wanted to make prints regularly without bankrupting myself I had to work on a small scale to cut down on costs. But this also had the advantage of forcing me to really hone my skills. The other advantage of working like this is that if a disaster does happen, then although frustrating, not too much is wasted.
Using lino for the daily challenges forced me to learn to work quickly and this has also helped in my approach to printmaking. It’s meant that I know, should I have to start over, I haven’t lost too much, and that’s made me brave (or perhaps blasé) in terms of executing the carving. However, I do find working on a larger scale more challenging as there is more to lose. On the rare occasions where I find myself procrastinating, it tends to be when I’m confronted with a larger piece of lino.
That said, there is nothing quite like the satisfaction of pulling a print and finding it’s worked out as you’d hoped, or the devastation of realising that you forgot to carve a letter in reverse and it’s printed backwards (as these are relief prints, everything has to be reversed when carving so that it prints the right way round). Early on in my journey, I excitedly carved a little Gameboy Mini only to find I’d forgotten to reverse the whole design and the print was back to front!
Talk about your discomfort with the label “artist”?
I continue to suffer from an incredible sense of imposter syndrome when it comes to thinking of myself as an artist. I’m an accountant by profession for which I’ve worked hard and studied for to earned a qualification in, and that was difficult to attain. But I haven’t studied art since high school nearly 30 years ago. And as it started off as a hobby, despite putting in countless hours of work, it hasn’t felt like work. So I almost feel like I haven’t earned it. I’m gradually becoming more comfortable with the idea, and I must confess, I’d much rather introduce myself as an artist than an accountant. The more I find myself connecting to others through my art, the more I feel I’ve earned the right to call myself an artist. Although I’m not entirely there yet!
Your work is a remix of pop culture, folklore, music and the everyday. Do these subjects collide organically in real-time as you’re sketching? Or are you consciously building a specific mythology through all of your art?
I’d say it’s a bit of both. Quite often something will come together organically, and then I’ll contrive a follow up, or multiple follow ups. A really good example of this is my movie themed tarot cards. These came about because of a Drawingskool prompt “Jester!” As I often like to take a circuitous route to approaching a prompt, I was brainstorming things associated with Jesters. I liked the idea of doing a print of Charlie Chaplin as he’s pretty iconic. And being from the era of black and white cinema I thought he’d work great as a lino print. I also liked the idea of doing a print of The Fool tarot card, and then it occurred to me to put them together. Subsequent cards in the series have been a mix of me specifically trying to fit a film I like to a card, a flash of inspiration, or often another response to a prompt. My second tarot card Death which has a Jaws theme, was a response to “Card Shark!”
I’ve also had recurring themes simply because I’ve found the experience entertaining or have liked the result of print and wanted to build on that. I occasionally find ways to incorporate my maker’s stamp into the composition of a piece which is a deliberate attempt to put a bit of me into the art — my stamp representing me, interacting with the subject. Which I think is a bit of mythology I have deliberately tried to build on.
What does your first solo show, Introducing Christophski, represent for you on a personal level?
I honestly can’t believe I’ve had the opportunity to do a solo show. It’s been quite overwhelming. I’ve talked a bit about my imposter syndrome and I think it’s clear that I never set out to become an “artist.” So the fact I’ve had work exhibited at a gallery, let alone a solo show, is something I’m still getting to grips with. It’s a boost every time someone leaves a positive comment on an Instagram post or sends me a message of support and it’s still an incredible feeling when someone wants to buy a print. I’m extremely grateful for all the support I’ve had from friends and followers on Instagram. So being asked to do a solo show felt like winning a marathon having not entered the race. And Heart of The Tribe Gallery has been great to work with, offering support and advice and generally giving me the confidence to feel like I belong there. So it’s certainly given me a sense of validation to some degree. But as a creative, the best part of it all is knowing that my work connects with people and gives them a bit of joy.
When people walk into the exhibtion, what do you hope stirs in them and what do you hope they take away?
I reflected on this while I was preparing for the exhibition, and I’ve got a short, simple answer: I really hope more than anything else, it makes people smile.
You can bring one of your pieces to life. Which one do you choose and what do they do?
That’s a fun question! I’d probably say Raven and the Wisp, which depicts a flying raven carrying an old-fashioned storm lantern containing a smoky, ghostly character. This was an image that fermented in the back of my mind for weeks before I finally committing it to paper. It came about as I wanted to bring together two persistent themes in my work, ghosts and ravens. And then I got talking to a lovely chap who uses a storm lantern for his business logo and the three things just came together. As I was drafting out the initial sketch, I felt like I was illustrating a book I’d never write, and the feeling intensified as I was carving out the image in the lino. It made me ask lots of questions like: Who are they? Where are they going? How did they get here? I like to think that if they came to life they’d be able to answer my questions and I’d be able to write that book. And that’s despite having never had any literary aspirations. Having said that, I never had any artistic aspirations either, so maybe one day it’ll happen!
Top three bands/musicians in your current playlist rotation.
Oh, this is a tough one, partly because my playlist has been taken over by my daughter and is currently dominated by TV Girl, Big Thief, Olivia Rodrigo and songs from Hamilton, which I’m fine with as I’ll quite happily listen to them all. But while I’m printing, I frequently find myself putting on old Pixies tracks, who I almost feel like I’m discovering for the first time as I didn’t give them the attention they deserved back in the 90s. But Weezer, Third Eye Blind and Fountains of Wayne are, and forever will, be long term residents on my playlists!
Your definition of art.
Oh, you should know by this point that I really don’t feel qualified to answer this one. I think the best thing I could go with is what art means to me. And to me, art is a means of connection, whether that be with a subject, a feeling or with people.
A golden nugget of wisdom to share with aspiring artists.
I’ve been asked this a few times by aspiring linocut artists just starting out, and what I always say is: “Do what you want to do, not what you think you ought to do, and enjoy doing it!”
Any projects, goals or dreams in the works for the upcoming year?
I’ve spent so much time prepping for the exhibition that I’m now desperate to get back to creating some new prints. I’d really like to add to my movie themed tarot card series. I’ve had some ideas that I’m really quite excited about and my ultimate ambition is to come up with a full set of Major Arcana cards, although that’s definitely a longer term project.
After years of making small, often tiny prints I’ve recently started making larger ones, and that’s something I really want to build on, and I’m sure they’ll involve a raven or two. I’d also like to build on my recent gallery experience and get myself “out there” in the physical world a bit more, rather than stick to the confines of Instagram. I have a couple of irons in the fire that I need to make a bit of time for, but I also hope to continue working with the Heart of The Tribe Gallery, as it’s been such a great experience.
I’ve also got a couple of collaborations on the horizon which I’m really hoping will come off and I’m keeping my fingers firmly crossed. But if we’re talking dreams, it’s increasingly to quit the rat race and become a full time artist! And of course, continue to work with the wonderful Birdy!
INTRODUCING CHRISTOPHSKI
On view through April 19, 2026 at Heart of The Tribe Gallery
More info: heartofthetribe.com
For prints + commissions, message Christophski on Instagram.
Limited prints available through Heart of The Tribe Gallery.
Check out Christophski’s Double December Cover in case you missed it. Head to our Explore or Issue section to see more work by this talented artist.