Last week I had a mail from the Japanese Art Institute at Nagasawa asking me to fill in a questionnaire prior my residency. Mostly it was fairly standard stuff about flights, insurance and medical documents to ensure I was fit to complete the course (I’m guessing that on the medical front they want to make sure that my hands will scab over fast and that I can endure kneeling for hours at a time – not good for someone who had a note for school from their mum to be allowed off kneeling, fortunately not copied across to my medical records). The interesting question was ‘Are you of extra height?’ Am I of extra height and by whose standards? Is that extra height amongst the Japanese, in which case the answer is oh yes? Or is it extra height among our local teenage school children? In which case the answer that I am not only average, but totally invisible.
In the end I gave my height in centimetres and said I didn’t know if that was ‘extra’. One thing I am sure about is that I have extra big feet compared to the Japanese. I have been out to buy the sort of trainers that have no laces in anticipation of having to leave them outside every building and also in anticipation that there will be no shoe buying once I arrive. My son pointed out that I could just leave the laces tied and force the shoes on and off like he does, but I belong to the start right generation who were smacked on the legs for that kind of thing.
These are the second pair of shoes I have bought recently, the others being their sartorial opposite: an impossible, beautiful, impractical pair of silver and grey stilettos by Ted Baker with four and a half inch heels. Known in the family as ‘TRT’ shoes (taxi, restaurant, taxi) they are a perfect fit: Ted may as well be cradling my feet in his very hands. The physics of balancing my height onto such high spindles had two unexpected results. The first was that they put me eye to eye with Jools Holland when I wore them to a charity event (he was standing on stage). The second was that they sent my calves into spasm, leaving me with Barbie’s strange tip toe stance. I won’t be taking them to Nagasawa: it takes time to lace myself into them and the last thing I want there is to be extra extra plus height…
Saturday, 29 August 2009
Monday, 13 July 2009
Writer's Block
Normally I consider myself to be pretty good at multitasking. Stuff like cooking dinner while yelling considered responses to politicians on Radio Four and sorting the laundry comes naturally to me, but I have fallen down badly when it comes to writing a book and a blog at the same time. I’m finding it near impossible to balance the two. Safe to say that, if this was life in the wild, David Attenborough would be commenting sadly on the inevitable neglect of the blog in favour of the dominance of the bigger work.
I have the amazing opportunity to work on a book which will document the time I spent down at AJ Wells and Sons creating my first public art work. I’m working with Phil who is an extraordinarily talented letter press printer (www.handandeye.co.uk) and his publisher Brian. The book will be a beauty, with hand set type and linocut illustrations. Phil is a sort of relative, though not actually by blood. He tells me that I qualify as step niece-in-law which, though a tenuous connection, is nice: I don’t have any uncles left and it is always good to think there’s one on hand for trips to the zoo and ice cream. To be serious, I am hoping that working with Phil will be a bit like printer’s boot camp: a chance for me to get my act together and clean up my technique.
For the purposes of illustration, I went back to Wells for a flying visit to gather images. This caused huge amusement on the shop floor, though everyone was very cooperative. It was good to see my mates again and to be accepted back without question. The only stipulation from Wells so far has been that I don’t reveal any enamelling trade secrets. Best if I do that here then. As far as I can see, you put it on wet, you dry it out and then you bake it in a high oven until it’s done.
I have the amazing opportunity to work on a book which will document the time I spent down at AJ Wells and Sons creating my first public art work. I’m working with Phil who is an extraordinarily talented letter press printer (www.handandeye.co.uk) and his publisher Brian. The book will be a beauty, with hand set type and linocut illustrations. Phil is a sort of relative, though not actually by blood. He tells me that I qualify as step niece-in-law which, though a tenuous connection, is nice: I don’t have any uncles left and it is always good to think there’s one on hand for trips to the zoo and ice cream. To be serious, I am hoping that working with Phil will be a bit like printer’s boot camp: a chance for me to get my act together and clean up my technique.
For the purposes of illustration, I went back to Wells for a flying visit to gather images. This caused huge amusement on the shop floor, though everyone was very cooperative. It was good to see my mates again and to be accepted back without question. The only stipulation from Wells so far has been that I don’t reveal any enamelling trade secrets. Best if I do that here then. As far as I can see, you put it on wet, you dry it out and then you bake it in a high oven until it’s done.
Sunday, 7 June 2009
To Have and Have Not
While I have a new studio, as yet I have not moved the contents down the garden to fill it. It’ll be an exhibition gallery for the visiting public over the next three weeks, though I will be doing printing demonstrations in there as well. I have however started to clear out the old studio ready for departure.
I stripped out the contents of my plan chest yesterday. I was lucky enough to inherit this from Ben’s grandfather via Ben’s parents who, in defiance of every in-law cliché going, support and help me with amazing kindness and generosity. The plan chest was full, now it is almost empty and I am filled with righteous pleasure. I think there are two sorts of people: the keepers and the keep-nots. Like my dad, I love getting shot of things. Out went my college work (though we have a definitive copy of every print. At the risk of showing off, so does the National Library of Wales Print Collection who acquired a set of my final project work) and lots of grubby paper, acetate and card in what I can only describe as groovy colours. This came with the chest and dated back to Ben’s parent’s art careers in the sixties and seventies. Casualties included dead beetles and a lot of fluff, probably from the thirties; beneficiaries included the men at the dump who were cheered considerably by my huge life drawings of naked ladies.
I have kept a few things including a Pirelli Calendar by Terence Donovan which is filled with African women, curvy and unimplanted, from the days when it was OK for models to be naturally beautiful. I also kept my pen and ink drawings from the streets of Soho. I spent a lot of time sitting, dressed in practical army surplus, on the pavement there in the early eighties and the drawings are a splotchy record of the days when Soho was a cheerfully smutty and run down law unto itself, far removed from the smart streets of today.
I stripped out the contents of my plan chest yesterday. I was lucky enough to inherit this from Ben’s grandfather via Ben’s parents who, in defiance of every in-law cliché going, support and help me with amazing kindness and generosity. The plan chest was full, now it is almost empty and I am filled with righteous pleasure. I think there are two sorts of people: the keepers and the keep-nots. Like my dad, I love getting shot of things. Out went my college work (though we have a definitive copy of every print. At the risk of showing off, so does the National Library of Wales Print Collection who acquired a set of my final project work) and lots of grubby paper, acetate and card in what I can only describe as groovy colours. This came with the chest and dated back to Ben’s parent’s art careers in the sixties and seventies. Casualties included dead beetles and a lot of fluff, probably from the thirties; beneficiaries included the men at the dump who were cheered considerably by my huge life drawings of naked ladies.
I have kept a few things including a Pirelli Calendar by Terence Donovan which is filled with African women, curvy and unimplanted, from the days when it was OK for models to be naturally beautiful. I also kept my pen and ink drawings from the streets of Soho. I spent a lot of time sitting, dressed in practical army surplus, on the pavement there in the early eighties and the drawings are a splotchy record of the days when Soho was a cheerfully smutty and run down law unto itself, far removed from the smart streets of today.
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…
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…
Thursday, 21 May 2009
First Impressions
The new press arrived yesterday in the care of Jeremy and Giles. Jeremy owns a company called Antique Machinery Removal and together with old school friend Giles, he travels the country ferrying all sorts of printing presses to and fro with no fuss and a lot of love and care. We were agitated, to say the least, about the logistics of getting more than a tonne of press out of an upper story art room in Barnet and across a long garden in Buckinghamshire. We shouldn’t have worried. I’ve seen more bother caused unloading a week’s worth of shopping than AMR made delivering my Albion.
Getting the bulk of the press into the studio was really only the start. The men then sat in the garden and carefully cleaned and oiled (not greased, we know now that grease is a big mistake) every component part before reassembling everything. Then we started on an extensive round of test prints to check the press was correctly adjusted. The testing was, well, testing to say the least: both Jeremy and Giles being expert printers. I began to feel like a mum caught by social services raising a child on turkey twizzlers and the odd nip of gin, my inks and rollers being bad enough to distress both men considerably. They were far too kind to be cross about it, but Jeremy urged me to ‘treat yourself to a couple of good rollers and replace that ink’ in a way that suggested ‘for the love of God woman, get a grip!’ would have been more in line with his feelings.
Having sorted out my new press, they cheerfully set about my old one ‘as we’re here’ and rebalanced and repacked it beautifully, managing to teach me more about printing in a couple of hours than I learnt in four years at art school. They cost a third less than our original quote and I would urge anyone who wants to buy or move a press to use them (there’s a link on my web site). Apart from anything else, I can’t imagine there are many people like Giles; a man prepared to buff a whole press to gleaming with baby oil, just to do it justice.
Getting the bulk of the press into the studio was really only the start. The men then sat in the garden and carefully cleaned and oiled (not greased, we know now that grease is a big mistake) every component part before reassembling everything. Then we started on an extensive round of test prints to check the press was correctly adjusted. The testing was, well, testing to say the least: both Jeremy and Giles being expert printers. I began to feel like a mum caught by social services raising a child on turkey twizzlers and the odd nip of gin, my inks and rollers being bad enough to distress both men considerably. They were far too kind to be cross about it, but Jeremy urged me to ‘treat yourself to a couple of good rollers and replace that ink’ in a way that suggested ‘for the love of God woman, get a grip!’ would have been more in line with his feelings.
Having sorted out my new press, they cheerfully set about my old one ‘as we’re here’ and rebalanced and repacked it beautifully, managing to teach me more about printing in a couple of hours than I learnt in four years at art school. They cost a third less than our original quote and I would urge anyone who wants to buy or move a press to use them (there’s a link on my web site). Apart from anything else, I can’t imagine there are many people like Giles; a man prepared to buff a whole press to gleaming with baby oil, just to do it justice.
Sunday, 10 May 2009
Poor Little Rich Girl
I always knew there would be some sort of trouble over the enamels for Great Western Street. It’s a perfectly correct saying that you can’t please all of the people all of the time and I never had any expectations of being a universal success. What I hadn’t expected was that my local newspaper would rocket me to dubious fame for charging the best part of half a million for my artwork. Oh Bucks Press, I wish it were true…
It’s a pity the journalists didn’t come and ask me, but I’m guessing they thought I was away on my yacht playing drinking games with Damien and Tracy. I could have given them the straight truth: I came pretty cheap (less than one of the street’s several bus shelters) and we worked out a way of producing the landscapes in a fantastically cost effective manner. To forget the aesthetics for a moment, I cost a lot less than a team of blokes power washing graffiti off blank white enamel every few weeks. This wasn’t art for art’s sake: it was a witty and engaging exercise in cladding a public space and I’m more than happy to stand by the superb practicality of the product and my added je ne sais quoi.
There have been lots and lots of ‘why oh why’ angry letters as a result of the article; understandable given the misunderstanding over cost and the implication that I’d whipped bread from the mouths of local orphans and shelter from the aged. My favourite was a lady who said ‘I honestly thought it was a temporary hoarding’. Now I said I’d be happy to do it all again like a shot, but even I wouldn’t throw quite so much energy into something so ephemeral. Though I would be enchanted to paint a landscape onto a hoarding in real time so the passersby could see an artist at work – anybody need one doing?
It’s a pity the journalists didn’t come and ask me, but I’m guessing they thought I was away on my yacht playing drinking games with Damien and Tracy. I could have given them the straight truth: I came pretty cheap (less than one of the street’s several bus shelters) and we worked out a way of producing the landscapes in a fantastically cost effective manner. To forget the aesthetics for a moment, I cost a lot less than a team of blokes power washing graffiti off blank white enamel every few weeks. This wasn’t art for art’s sake: it was a witty and engaging exercise in cladding a public space and I’m more than happy to stand by the superb practicality of the product and my added je ne sais quoi.
There have been lots and lots of ‘why oh why’ angry letters as a result of the article; understandable given the misunderstanding over cost and the implication that I’d whipped bread from the mouths of local orphans and shelter from the aged. My favourite was a lady who said ‘I honestly thought it was a temporary hoarding’. Now I said I’d be happy to do it all again like a shot, but even I wouldn’t throw quite so much energy into something so ephemeral. Though I would be enchanted to paint a landscape onto a hoarding in real time so the passersby could see an artist at work – anybody need one doing?
Sunday, 3 May 2009
Launch
A week or so ago we had the official launch for the Great Western Street enamels. It was organised on my behalf by AJ Wells and Sons and Aylesbury Vale District Council who between them did me proud and managed to pick a day of glorious sunshine.
I'm not really very good at doing stuff like that to be honest, give me an early start in an unseen corner of a factory any time, but I think it went well. Accounts manager Andy has since scarily told me that he filmed my speech. I sincerely hope he was joking. My dear husband made an animated gif out of photographs of the event, making me look like a recently escaped and soon to be recaptured maniac. The best things really were the commemorative coasters organised by Ced Wells which have one of my decorative trees on the front and are each signed as a numbered edition. They are brilliant and were a smash hit - the council cabinet member left with ten for the Aylesbury Vale Council board room (so he said, though I'll be watching Ebay) and the rest have been snapped up.
In an effort to prepare for the big day I went and had my nails done. A first for me and a bit of a disappointment I think for the nail technician as all I wanted was 'something that doesn't show much'. She improved my hands to a degree amazing enough for me to wave them excitedly at Andy before the launch. He handled this with the kind of urbane charm that suggests interestingly to me that admiring a subcontractor’s choice of nail polish is all in a day's work for accounts management at AJ Wells. I'm afraid it didn't last long as I've since broken two nails in a badger related incident (and there's not many women can say that of their first manicure). Our local badgers have been digging up our lawn in their annual hunt for cockchafer grubs and I tripped in a hole, flung out my hands and promptly smashed both thumbnails on our Worcester Pearmain. Like the enamels - nice while they lasted, but over with far too fast!
I'm not really very good at doing stuff like that to be honest, give me an early start in an unseen corner of a factory any time, but I think it went well. Accounts manager Andy has since scarily told me that he filmed my speech. I sincerely hope he was joking. My dear husband made an animated gif out of photographs of the event, making me look like a recently escaped and soon to be recaptured maniac. The best things really were the commemorative coasters organised by Ced Wells which have one of my decorative trees on the front and are each signed as a numbered edition. They are brilliant and were a smash hit - the council cabinet member left with ten for the Aylesbury Vale Council board room (so he said, though I'll be watching Ebay) and the rest have been snapped up.
In an effort to prepare for the big day I went and had my nails done. A first for me and a bit of a disappointment I think for the nail technician as all I wanted was 'something that doesn't show much'. She improved my hands to a degree amazing enough for me to wave them excitedly at Andy before the launch. He handled this with the kind of urbane charm that suggests interestingly to me that admiring a subcontractor’s choice of nail polish is all in a day's work for accounts management at AJ Wells. I'm afraid it didn't last long as I've since broken two nails in a badger related incident (and there's not many women can say that of their first manicure). Our local badgers have been digging up our lawn in their annual hunt for cockchafer grubs and I tripped in a hole, flung out my hands and promptly smashed both thumbnails on our Worcester Pearmain. Like the enamels - nice while they lasted, but over with far too fast!
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