Dorothea Wight - Telegraph Dorothea Wight first established her studio as a workshop for plate making and editioning etchings in 1968, shortly after leaving art school, in a damp basement of a building awaiting demolition in Modbury Road, Chalk Farm. In 1972 the studio moved to new premises in Queen's Crescent, into a building which had been the first branch of Sainsbury's, where she installed three presses and other equipment. The studio was opened by Lord Sainsbury, and from the mid 1970s Dorothea Wight ran it with Marc Balakjian, the Armenian-born artist who became her husband in 1977. Dorothea and her husband worked with more than 100 artists, while also making a name for themselves as artists in their own right. Lucian Freud made 47 of his later etchings at Studio Prints and other clients included Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Ron Kitaj, Julian Trevelyan, Norman Ackroyd, Stephen Conroy, Ken Kiff, Celia Paul, Paula Rego and William Tillyer. Celia Paul has recalled that Dorothea Wight "had a way of wiping a plate to create a glowing effect, and was particularly good at catching the quality of light." To prepare a plate for one of Celia Paul's soft-ground etchings, she would immerse it in very dilute acid, checking its progress every quarter of an hour; the whole process might take four days. Towards the end of her career, when illness prevented her from working on plates herself, she trained her daughter, Tamar, to produce her characteristic effects. Dorothea's own preferred medium was the coloured mezzotint and over the course of 30 years she exhibited her work, mostly dream-like landscapes seen through windows, at group and solo exhibitions in Britain and around the world, winning many prizes. The art critic Guy Keriben observed that she had a "secret bond" with her medium that allowed her to "create a world where all the delights of a thought float between dream and memory" evoking "a lost world of tranquillity and happiness." One of her prints was used by Pat Gilmour in her book Understanding Contemporary Prints to illustrate the mezzotint process, and examples of her work are held in the permanent collections of museums and galleries including the V&A, the British Museum, the Bibliotheque National in Paris and the Warsaw Museum of Fine Art. Dorothea Wight was born on September 23 1944 and grew up in Devon where her father ran a pottery. After Totnes High School and a year at Dartington School of Art, she attended the Slade School of Fine Art where she studied painting, but was soon drawn to the print department under Anthony Gross. She was taught lithography by Stanley Johns. She founded Studio Prints shortly after graduation, having persuaded her bank manager to give her a loan to buy a press. Her first customer was the artist Julian Trevelyan, who rode to the rescue when the delivery of her press was delayed, offering her the use of his press at his riverside studio in Hammersmith. Trevelyan became a loyal customer and firm friend. As well as running her workshop, Dorothea Wight taught printmaking at Morley College and at art schools including the Royal College, Cambridge, Brighton and Medway. As a visiting lecturer she established an etching department at the Camden Institute. As a child Dorothea learned the piano and she later returned to the instrument, winning a prize for a public performance of Satie's Gymnopédie No I. With her husband she enjoyed travelling around European cities; at home they liked to take breakfast at Kenwood House and walk on Hampstead Heath. Dorothea Wight was an honorary member of the Royal Society of Painter Etchers. In 2000 she was diagnosed with a rare form of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and in 2011, as her health deteriorated, she and her husband decided to close Studio Prints. For the last six months of her life her only contact with the outside world was the view from her bedroom window of a corner of the garden where forget-me-nots flowered. Dorothea Wight is survived by her husband and by a son and daughter. Dorothea Wight, born September 23 1944, died May 23 2013