For details about my work have a look at my website, www.lauraboswell.co.uk

I am currently working on large prints combining water based woodblock techniques with oil based linocut: nothing if not a challenge! I'm also doing some teaching and go back to school myself in the spring to qualify as an adult education tutor

Friday 29 May 2009

What's in a Name?

The three weekends when I open my studio to the public are fast approaching (do come if you can, just go to the Open Studios link on my website for times and a map, though I excuse my faithful internet visitor from Guatemala who appears so gratifyingly on Google analytics) and this means a frenzy of framing, sign painting, packing of greetings cards and last minute printing. In among all this frantic activity I have to think of titles for my pictures to be printed onto little bits of card along with prices for the exhibition.

Most of my landscapes are an unravelling of reality, patched together and sewn back into a satisfying shape by me, usually in a mess of pencils and old fanfold computer paper. I would love to say that my considered drawings are complied in a series of dated and numbered sketch books, but we’re mostly talking about a couple of wonky lines on the back of a till receipt (the tax office will have an archive of my early work if they ever audit me). The upshot of the way I work is that it’s usually impossible just to title a print by location; not unless I wanted to combine a variety of place names and arrive at a new one in the manner popular with house names in the seventies and still so with beach huts (you should see the ones at Sandown). The upshot is that my work mostly appears under titles like ‘Winter hedge’ and ‘Fen Sunset’ – not very exciting, but honest.

The honourable exceptions and almost my favourite prints to make are those attributed to friends and family. You’ll see ‘Andy’s beach’ along with ‘Vicky, Kev and Ben’s landscapes’ on my site. These are a result of my pinching landscapes from other people’s descriptions of places they love. I never ask for these: that would kill the images stone dead in a welter of self consciousness. To take ‘Andy’s Beach’ as an example (www.lauraboswell.co.uk/landscape41.html), it is a very simple print and a direct reflection of Andy’s pleasure in walking with his family along the beaches on the Isle of Wight on weekends. I was aiming at catching his very British ability to relish a bit of sunshine, the possibility of brewing some tea in a beach hut and maybe pushing the boat out later with an ice cream…

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