Laura Boswell’s Studio Diary

I’ve been teaching a lot recently, followed up by a week’s residency at a museum. All this has given me more exposure than usual to lots of people with their thoughts and opinions about printmaking. This of course coincided with a period when Radio Four actually seemed to be cheering up a bit with some more upbeat programming. (At least that is how it sounded as I twiddled the volume up and down in time to the arrival of visitors. Doubtless now I am back in the studio it will be a return to job loss, terminal illness and general all round middle class angst.)

This has resulted in the interesting and at times frustrating fact that on the one hand I have students who are excruciatingly hard on themselves for not managing to produce a perfectly aligned and sensitive Japanese woodblock in the space of a few hours, while on the other I have people telling me that what I am doing is akin to potato printing they did at school.

A lovey first time attempt by one of my recent students – one to be proud of I think.

In fact both attitudes are a symptom of this present fiction that arts and crafts are achievable and achievable fairly fast. I know that there is a great deal of TV time given over to darning socks with retro wool and hand baking your own sofa cushions, but these programmes either insist you do it within the hour or face elimination, or worse, they simply gloss from thought to result with an airy ‘ooh I never thought taxidermy would be so easy!’…

Fact is that being good takes time and practice. Knowing what to do is one thing, doing it fluently is quite another. I know how to plaster a ceiling, but every time I lie in my bath I can see that an apprenticeship would have been a good idea. One of the best things about my residency in Japan was to learn that time spent in practice was time spent well and that hard won expertise was to be respected and honoured. It’s the only time I have had my job description win more respect for me than less from the man in the street.

raising fine detail by clearing away most of the wood, this takes time to do well and accurately

So please students, stop beating yourself up: most of you do better than I did in the same space of time, much better and, if you apply yourself as I do, then the floating world of Japanese printmaking is your oyster. To the potato printers from school, you are spot on: relief printing is the same process and, like you, I did that at school too. I also learned to play tennis, but sadly I’m a long way off the professional circuit…

At the moment there is somebody out there in internet land who is convinced that I ache to play bingo. Several times a day I am showered with mail encouraging me to rush some site, spend my money and waste my time. It doesn’t matter how many times I unsubscribe and mark the mail as spam, Mr Bingo keeps on trying. I wouldn’t mind, but the thought that I now belong to a demographic of bingo playing types (no offence, but in my mind that equates to drinking port and lemon and having a best hat) is rather demoralising. Junk mail, how I hate it.

However, it must also be said that I am keen to mail people myself. An important part of my work is keeping a mailing list. I like it: it’s like having an online pet. It grows and I am delighted, it shrinks and I worry. I am nerdy in checking my analytics; graphs that are all about me are much, much more fun than anything I learned in CSE maths (yup, too mathematically challenged to sit an ‘O’ Level, though I did get a grade one and that, I believe, came the same thing. Best of all I was taught by the teacher who survived being shot with a rifle while waiting at a bus stop – most kudos in the maths department obviously…)

I do try and avoid Mr Bingo’s lovebombing technique. These days we all have to wait for people to want to subscribe and nothing will put people off faster than asking them to sign up for emails. Needy, just like in dating, is not the way forward. I prefer the insouciance of the carefully placed clip board, the casual reference to my mailings: ‘What? You’d like to sign up? Really? Well please do give me your address’. It’s an option on my web site, but you do have to actually sign up rather than be tricked into it by Yoda style grammar. I never combine my visitor’s book with mailing list form. People should be entitled to tell me that they like/love/hate my work without feeling I may send love/hate mail in return.

The mails themselves I try to make fun, lots of pictures, useful links, a bit about the ongoing story of my work and, most important of all, I only send them when I have something to say. And that doesn’t include saying the same thing again and again in the hope that the recipient will crack and, in my case, develop a keen need to shout ‘house!’ at my laptop.

The subject of touching up is always a bit controversial even when, as here, I am referring to prints rather than people. It is something my students tend to discuss between themselves in whispers as though expecting me to descend on them with a cane if I were to catch them at it. Far from it: I do it myself.

There are plenty of purists out there who apply rules to the making of art and craft. Some of those are quite rightly maintaining guilds and official standards – botanical painting springs to mind. Others just want to keep things ‘proper’. The latter always make me want to be as improper as possible. I had a meltdown in a marquee once when some ladies told me that I ‘couldn’t’ spin wool the way I had learned in a croft on Islay (and how proper an apprenticeship is that?) because it wasn’t the way they did it. I may be doing it wrong, but my jumpers seem to work OK…

Japanese woodblock with some hand colouring

In the small world of my studio, I believe that as long as whatever you do doesn’t affect the archival integrity of the work, then it’s all fair game. To that end I blot off marks, correct coverage by painting with the pad of my fingertips, touch up with brushes (sadly this latter is almost impossible with Japanese woodblock and, interestingly, vitreous enamel. Both being too sensitive to hide that sort of correction) and generally do what I have to if I think it will improve the result. I also mend woodblocks with filler and glue when I get the chance. Lino is not so cooperative to repair, making it swings and roundabouts in terms of touching up prints.
I also hand paint certain parts of prints sometimes and this picture is an example in point. I wanted some of the leaves to have gold on them so I have dropped it in with a brush. I’m OK with that, though purists would argue that a Japanese woodblock should only be printed. Actually, I think the Japanese are great pragmatists: they printed every detail during the Edo period because they were mass printing for a client, not working on personal limited editions. I would hazard a guess they would touch in colour if it was the practical answer.

The conclusion I’m aiming at is that I never feel bad about touching up and corrections and I strongly advise students to make this a practical part of their knowledge. Maybe when I get on in years I will end up in a tent telling people that they are doing it all wrong, but I don’t think that’s likely. I’ll probably still be in my studio breaking the rules myself…

Is this art, craft or something else?

I’ve just accepted a booking to give a talk about my work as a printmaker. The reply was that the group were looking forward to it ‘although some of the members will need to be persuaded that printmaking is art’. I was a bit floored by this. Art seems sometimes to be more class ridden than a day out at Ascot. I’m used, as a printmaker, to being considered fairly low on the scale. Indeed, as a linocut printer, I am sometimes given the impression that I’m a grubby tag-along at best. The idea that what I do for a living isn’t even art was a novelty though.

I’m my father’s daughter. As a self made man with a desperately hard childhood he would say ‘Who gives a damn what you call it as long as they get their wallets out’. I’m not going to lose any sleep: my work sells, my teaching is in demand and I’m confident in my work. However I wonder if the good members of the group think perhaps printing is more ‘craft’?

I’d be the first to agree that there is a strong element of craftsmanship in printmaking and craft skills are something I am seriously proud to have: craft, like printmaking, tends to be dismissed. Craft has suffered from being used as a catch-all name for the peddling of tat at what used to be called ‘Bring and Buy’ and now are inevitably ‘Craft Shows’. So printmakers are confused with the button pressing of the modern computer printer and mindless mass reproduction. I now have to explain that my work is entirely hand cut and hand pulled by me which generates true astonishment at times.

I’d like to reclaim both art and craft for printmaking in the true sense of the words. The craft is in the process. It is a very highly skilled job to be a good printmaker and it requires years of practice learning the craft. The process skills can be taught to anyone given the time and I’m confident I could produce a craftsman from the man in the street (should he wish to be kidnapped and kept in a studio for a very long time), but that wouldn’t make him an artist. The art bit is knowing what to do with those skills when you have them.

I’m not sure that this thinking would change much in the hierarchy of the art world where conceptual fine art seems to be top of the heap at the moment, but at least I have my thoughts in order for the talk I have to give…