BEN SANDS is one of those artists you’ve probably never heard of, but should have. He worked in woodcuts and linocuts as well as being an expert typesetter and accomplished painter.

I first became aware of him when his son Matt started putting photographs of his prints on Facebook.

Even with this less than ideal presentation, I could see straight away that this work was something special. It is meticulous and precise and yet bursting with life at the same time.

Sands was born in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, in 1920. He was the youngest child of parents who had emigrated from Poland in 1913.

He was left-handed but, in the convention of the time, forced to write with his right hand. However he was allowed to paint and draw using his left hand, which probably goes a long way towards explaining the quality of his work.

He gave a fascinating insight into the act of cutting into a block of wood in a 2003 interview: “…automatically, with practice, your mind sees that block as a field of solid black … when you start cutting you start letting the light into the block and revealing the world which ultimately you are going to present to the public.

“Because you are letting light in all the time, every cut you make lets another streak of light in…”

If he was restricted by his right hand, he was unconstrained and powerfully gifted with his left. He developed skills that won him a scholarship to the Willesden College of Art in 1934.

In 1943, he was conscripted into an Irish army regiment, the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, and spent his war in Italy.

He was stationed in Austria for over a year after it ended, and the image The Regimental Wet Canteen is based upon drawings he made in Austria at this time, although the linocut wasn’t completed until 1990.

After leaving the army, Sands refused to collect his service medals, saying that surviving the war intact was enough.

He enrolled at the Central School of Art in London, then worked as a commercial artist in various studios, practising skills in typography and illustration.

The image of the rag-and-bone men wolf-whistling a passing woman, with scenes of bomb damage in the background, dates from this post-war period.

In the 1950s he met and married the love of his life, Bonna, with whom he had two children, Matt and David.

The family moved to the then sleepy seaside town of Whitstable in Kent in 1960 and it was from here that he produced his most characteristic work.

Although he worked as a typographic designer and had to commute up to London for work, in his spare time he produced a string of broadsheets and hand-printed books under the imprint of the Shoestring Press.

The commute to London was, as today, a slow torture that he endured for the sake of the family and the print Commuters is a product of this time.

It is a view from an elevated position, just under the roof of the carriage and he achieved it, in those pre-selfie-stick days, using only his imagination.

He was a life-long socialist and, although he never joined the Labour Party, he contributed to it for many years.

He stopped his direct debit in 1994 after Blair went to see Murdoch following his ascension to the leadership of the party.

Sands sent a letter to Labour Party headquarters to explain. “If you’ve got Rupert Murdoch’s money behind you, you don’t need mine,” he wrote.

You can see his socialism in his work too — a celebration of the lives of ordinary people depicted with simple, unaffected warmth.

He never lost his eye for these scenes of everyday life, captured in the moment and preserved through the medium of print, the mainstay of his work.

Most of it is set in and around Whitstable. People wait at a bus stop or stroll along the seafront and there are mothers with babies in push chairs and kids playing in a play ground, Whitstable market stalls on a Thursday morning and Morris dancers on May Day.

There is such richness of texture, vibrancy and depth here. His skies, particularly, are luminous and vivid, showing a mastery of technique that is sometimes astonishing.

They come alive, as do his characters and, although you can pinpoint the era in which these scenes take place by the dress, there is a timeless quality to them.

Sands would have been 100 last year and we had originally planned to mark it in 2020 but the pandemic got in the way.

So we’re celebrating his 101st this year with an exhibition of his work at the Horsebridge Arts Centre, 11 Horsebridge Road, Whitstable from June 18 to July 4, details: thehorsebridge.org.uk.