Good day!

PRINTOCRATS is an eBay-based art gallery trading exclusively in original prints. It is an affiliate of the ROCHE gallery - a High Street art gallery and framing business, located in Rye, East Sussex.

The owners of the ROCHE gallery are Marina Kim and Tim Roche. Marina is a talanted and versatile artist. She specialises in portraiture, but is also very productive in other genres of visual arts. A lot of her output is... original prints, which are represented in PRINTOCRATS.

In January 2009 Marina and Tim decided to branch out with the original prints into a separate online business, and eBay seemed like the perfect vehicle. Marina's friend Vera Kolpakova from Moscow joined the venture, and the eBay art gallery PRINTOCRATS was born! 

PRINTOCRATS' policy is to sell and promote original prints and artists working in this area of fine arts. We should like to emphisise the fact that we only sell original prints and not reproductions.

A process called Giclee printing is used to produce good quality reproductions of paintings, which can be arbitrarily limited to a certain number of copies and called limited edition prints. This term is frequently confused - often intentionally - with original printmaking. 

There are many artists working in various Fine Art printmaking techniques, creating brilliant original prints. I understand, that as a buyer, you might like the image for what it is, and the way it is created may be of less importance. However, you should know the real value of anything you buy. With original prints, there is the passion, skill, and hands-on work of the artist-printmaker, as well as the collectability, archival quality and simply the feel of the real thing. A reproduction is an image, printed by a machine, using a scanned image of the original picture. It can be numbered and bear the autograph of the artist, but will still remain a purely mechanical process.