Laura Boswell’s Studio Diary

Don’t try this at Home

Mounting Japanese woodblock prints and what not to do!

So, what do artists do all day? I’ll give you a snapshot into this morning…

Today I discover that an experiment I made in backing a pair of prints with a sheet of paper to unite them flat for framing has sort of worked. Sadly the bit that hasn’t is quite important: the prints are desirably flat, but the backing paper is now tightly bonded to the glass sheet I used to support the experiment.

This is a bad thing, but not insurmountable. True these are finished prints and they are now stuck fast to the wrong thing, but they are Japanese woodblock prints. This means I can sit at the kitchen table with a bath sponge and a bowl of water and dab them until the whole thing is wet enough for me to release. Japanese watercolour and rice prints look delicate, but take damping and re-damping with the insouciance of the British at a bank holiday barbeque. I have two more sets of prints to go and another avenue of mounting needs exploring.

I learned the art of backing prints with supporting paper while on residency in Japan. Imagine the scene: a big room empty but for tatami mats and sliding paper screens, Mount Fuji at the end of the garden and students kneeling attentively (this does not include me. I cannot kneel and used to carry a note excusing me from kneeling in infant school. I stand respectfully instead). What the master says makes absolute sense and we accordingly mount and back prints successfully. What doesn’t translate, once I am in my own kitchen, is the access to the right brushes and papers. Here I am lacking in wide hemp, rabbit and deer hair brushes and the easy availability of washi paper. My prints are on European paper and I have emulsion brushes from the builder’s merchants. It’s now a question of adapt or fail.

This time I decide that the glass is best lined with cling film to prevent the backing sheet from sticking. I have seen Masterchef: I know cling film has diverse uses. First I wash the big sheet of picture glass in the bath to remove the last batch of gummed paper. As the glass slips around, I consider the health and safety forms I’ve just filled in for a class I have to teach. They require me to warn students not to trip over their own belongings. Nowhere do they cover the stupidity of juggling large sheets of thin, wet glass in a hard, curved bath.

I and the glass survive. Lining with cling film goes well, but then I worry the gummed tape to stretch the paper won’t stick so resolve to cut the film to the size of the paper to expose glass to the tape. For some reason I choose to use a meat cleaver for this (I am in the kitchen after all). More suited for a father intent on discouraging his daughter’s admirers, it actually works a treat and I am able to put fresh paper onto the film on the glass, damp and stretch.

The prints need to be stuck down with rice glue. I’ve made the glue by beating the hell out of a stiff rice and water paste for a full half hour over high heat while wondering if this is for the glue’s improvement or mine. Traditionally the resulting rubber ball is then diluted again by working with a hemp brush. I use the milkshake option on the blender. The cat appears and walks about on the prints. I shut him out. He swings on the door handle and yells, so I stop and place a chair in the sun where he agrees to sit and assumes the expression of Prince Phillip watching some not-so-good tribal dancing. I coat the back of my second batch of damp prints with the rice glue and offer them up to my scrupulously drawn guide lines more in hope than expectation. When they were handing out accuracy, I veered off course into the queue for creativity. I do my best, seal everything down and leave with the cat to dry in the warm.

It’s not yet nine am. This is a pretty normal day for me and I suspect for a lot of you creative people. It’s what we do and, though it’d be nice if things ran to plan, I do like a job that keeps me on my toes…

Make do and Mend

Normally I write as a printmaker, but this one is about my mum. I wonder if you’ve seen the Great British Sewing Bee? No? Just me then… Several awfully nice people appear once a week on the BBC with mugs of tea and compete in a hopelessly friendly and supportive way to find the best amateur sewer in the UK. I enjoy this programme with a fondness out of all proportion to the contest, even allowing for the transparent decency and good nature of all involved. It transports me straight back to my mum the dressmaker. The woman who, for a while, stitched sample fashion garments just off Bond Street and, being unfashionably tall and slender for the time, sometimes modeled them as well.

Mum, like a lot of people, is drifting with Alzheimer’s. We spend our visits searching for each other: I look for the mum I used to have and she looks for something about me she can recognise. Her ferocious intelligence and determination still shine through, but we know it’s a losing battle.

My sewing began with mum indulging whims: making a prairie sundress and tricky sun bonnet for the time I fell in love with the Laura Ingalls-Wilder books and wanted something suited to the arid plains of West London. Later a cloak with scarlet lining worn by my brother; ‘it made your father furious’ she said happily, ‘he didn’t actually say anything when he saw it, but he was up a ladder at the time and you could see it shaking’. Later still we worked on my school sewing project: a gingham apron. I was sent home with instructions to cut it out and together mum and I made it up as well, deciding it would be more interesting if it were reversible, with double pockets and some appliqué. On the Monday I found out the project was to take an entire term to complete and that I had a new enemy in the sewing mistress.

I don’t remember mum actually teaching me to sew, she just bailed me out when I went wrong and told me what to look for in a properly sewn garment. We traveled to London from time to time gravely inspecting the new arrivals in Liberty’s fabric department, though we bought our cloth from a lovely lady under the arches of South Harrow tube station. She’d keep things by that she thought we’d like. ‘Lovely stuff, heavy for its weight’ was one of her favourite comments. We did buy the glorious matt oyster silk for my wedding dress at Liberty, the only time I saw mum make a practice dress in calico first. All the while I absorbed the vocabulary of sewing: welts, facings, French seams, darts and all. I learned that a pattern calling for three yards of material could be cut from two and a half and that hems and seams will always betray an inferior garment.

I haven’t sewn in years apart from curtains and cushions. But the arrival of this programme coinciding with the sale of my mum’s house and her residential care has been a gift. A couple of weeks ago I went into London and though Liberty sadly no longer fits the bill, I found a good French crepe (French is best apparently and this was indeed ‘heavy for its weight’) and a fine British wool in Berwick Street. I took a couple of evenings off and the time and trouble to make up a couple of well fitting and elegant lined skirts in tribute to my mum’s teaching. I’m nowhere near good (or nice enough) for the Sewing Bee, but I did so enjoy making those skirts and I think they would just about pass muster with mum.

Little Miss Dainty

From time to time I get back to basics and work on some smaller prints and on techniques. The four little prints here are all linocuts and three of them are about printing white ink over darker colours, the other is an experiment in treating water based lino ink as a colour wash.

I like working small sometimes. Any of you following my blog or Facebook page will know that I have worked on some extremely big prints over the last year or two. Exciting stuff, but so demanding: everything at the limits of my strength, arm length and patience. In my files somewhere I have a Victorian print of a tightly corseted lady pulling the lever of a tiny tabletop Albion press with the very tips of her white gloves. She looks like the physical exertion will demand a lengthy slumber on a chaise longue while the servants clean up and bring tea. I don’t run to having servants, chaise longue or even a corset, but I do have a smallish Albion and can at least play at being a lady for a while.

The first three prints are all fairly straightforward reduction prints using oil based ink on zerkal paper. The seaside one ‘Bitter Afternoon’ features some free inking (that sounds like something from the recent Olympics. In fact it just means mixing up a number of colours and using little rollers to paint the lino each time I print) and relies on my drawing on the lino with a dip pen and Indian ink to give the scratchy final line layer. ‘Frost at Full Moon’ has partial inking where I have just caught the tips of the fir trees with a suggestion of white and also relies on graduations of one colour into another. ‘Sheep and Sky’ is about playing with pattern. I often use birds for punctuation, breaking up the repeat of the clouds and giving the image more balance here.

The last print ‘Summer Cloudburst’ was demanding. I used roasaspina paper and water based lino inks pushed to their very limits with extender. I painted on the block rather than drew and cut around the paint strokes layer by layer. With the inks at this level of dilution, the number of times I passed the roller over the block became crucial to the image and there is a real feeling of the demands of using translucent colour. Because I was painting the image a layer at a time, I had no way of having the image mapped out on the block in advance which was new to me and, as always, my respect to you watercolourists out there.

The upshot is a selection of prints which I will offer at £80 unframed. I have been able to develop some ideas and enjoyed tripping lightly to and fro with my petite prints while building up some stock at a fair price for its size and content. Now I’ll just loosen my stays and wait for tea and a slice of seed cake…

The Professionals

‘Everyone can draw and paint’ was a title for a class I saw recently. I’d say ‘everyone can draw and paint up to a point’ would be much more accurate, but I’m guessing that wouldn’t sell classes so well.

It’s interesting how controversial it can be for a professional artist (and by professional I mean somebody who makes a living as an artist) to come out and suggest that ‘art’ isn’t universally achievable. To tell people at large that their efforts, however delightful, do not make them artists is often seen as nasty elitist insecurity on our part. I cook, I take photos, I sew and I garden. I’m pretty good at all of those and I enjoy them immensely. What I don’t expect is to be considered a chef, photographer, tailor or professional gardener. I’m not hurt by this and nor do I feel that these various professions are somehow being elitist by excluding me from their ranks. After all, and here’s the point, they spend years learning, studying, practicing, perfecting.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the fact that I teach and that most of my students are total beginners. I know that my classes bring them pleasure and nobody, and my students will agree, is more excited than me by their marvelous prints. But to actually make a living, earn an annual income year in and year out, large enough to fix the plumbing and pay the mortgage, is not a matter of the odd class and enthusiasm. It’s down to hard won skills and talent developed over years of training and effort. So let’s not confuse art being for everyone (which it certainly is) and everyone being an artist (which they certainly aren’t).

Job’s Worth

It’s easy to get disheartened when you’re an artist working alone. All sorts of little things add up and up until I sometimes take refuge in stomping about declaring that I would be better off doing something that started at nine, ended at five and involved a pension, holiday pay and company. I think this may be a somewhat dated idea of the workplace based on Radio Four Extra’s endless supply of old sitcoms, but there are days when being outrageously patronised as I make tea seems almost attractive.

The trick is, I suppose, to see that things do balance out. For every instance of petty theft, there’s an honest soul like the lady who went to enormous lengths to return a pencil she’d inadvertently packed into her equipment. All the silly comments about artists and how we indulge in a super-wonderful time of things dabbling at our hobby are somehow cured by the serious young couple who bought my first ever really big print and turn up at Art in Action each year to gravely buy a print and discuss my work. The horrible, horrible business of accounts and tax returns eased a bit by the fun of swapping a print for a basic lesson in bookkeeping. The hours of preparing for classes noticed by the one student who’s a teacher and tells you you’re well prepared and that she knows what that involves…

So I may be beginning 2014 a bit frazzled, but on reflection I wouldn’t trade this particular job for anything. Not even the chance to make a cuppa for the Men at the Ministry…

Saving Paper

What is washi?

‘It’s only paper’ is something that I say to my students on a fairly regular basis; at least to the ones who are reluctant to commit pen to paper or paper to woodblock. However, here in Japan, paper is never really only paper. Paper here has significance from the architectural to the spiritual and perhaps the most important paper of all is washi.

Without plunging too deep into the science, washi is more akin to fabric than paper. Consisting of a tangle of long bark fibres, usually mulberry (kozo), it is phenomenally strong and remains so when wet (forget about advertising claims for kitchen towels which, trust me, are as tin foil to sheet steel in comparison). It is this strength and good natured love of the damp that makes it the perfect paper for water based Japanese woodblock.

Washi papermaking is very skilled and demanding work

As with all things, there’s a catch. Washi paper production is not easy. Hand made washi production even less so: it’s a brutal and demanding process. Bark has to be harvested, steamed, stripped, cleaned, picked over, beaten, mixed, formed and so forth. Mostly this seems to happen in the bitter cold, the only relief being the opportunity for a scalding when steaming the bark from the stems. It’s a huge tribute to the paper makers of Japan that there are still small concerns producing washi by hand among the more industrialised makers. One antidote to this hardship is the importing of bark fibres from China and Thailand where others get the chilly job of harvesting and processing. Except it’s not so chilly. Warmer climates means faster growth and softer fibres, changing the nature of the paper itself.

Throughout this residency I have been printing on a wide variety of marvellous hand-made washi papers. They bring a luminosity to the print: the pigments entering the fibre itself and becoming one with the paper. I’m under no illusions: I won’t be able to get anything approaching this quality and weight of paper in the UK. Not yet anyway. But it doesn’t have to be like that. In 2014 there will be a Washi Fair at the International Mokuhanga Print Conference. I hope to encourage a UK paper stockist to visit with me to see beyond the small range of papers now available in the UK and to help in the ongoing work to support washi paper makers and to create a stable, affordable supply of these excellent printmaking papers for the future.

Amateur Night

In 2014 there will be an international conference for artists working in Japanese woodblock. It’ll be in Toyko and I hope perhaps to deliver a paper there on the subject of my students and their response to learning the technique with me in the UK.

I have yet to write an application and, far more important, work out if I can afford the cost and time to get there. In the meantime here’s a few thoughts about those of you who have dipped your toes in the traditions of watercolour woodblock and why you play such an important part in saving this beautiful printing method from going the way of the dodo.

Keiko Kadota is an extraordinary woman: she organises and runs residencies, like this one I am currently attending, to teach Western artists the skills and techniques of traditional Japanese woodblock through the organisation Mi-Lab. In addition she has been battling for years to support the craftspeople responsible for producing cutting tools, printing brushes and paper. She faces an uphill task: traditional Japanese woodblock is seen in Japan through a haze of nostalgia as a largely historic process. Tool makers are veering away from traditional tool forms to Westernised handles and shapes, impractical for the cutting of traditional blocks. Brush makers are finding sales dwindling. Paper makers need a whole blog in themselves – so more on that difficult subject later. On the whole the outlook is not great here and if it weren’t for Keiko and her residencies and conference, it would be so much worse…

That’s where you come in: all those of you who want to learn and at all levels. Every single student from the expert printmakers wanting to add a new skill to their repertoire to the out and out amateur who has never printed before helps to promote the process and create demand.

Laura Teaching — Laura teaching a group in Wolverhampton

If I do get back to Japan and face the esteemed audience of academics and contemporary artists, I’m going to be pushing for the recognition of the Christmas card makers, the recipients of the unexpected class as a birthday surprise, the beginners and the unsure. You may just save the day for us professionals!

Moving On

Sometimes it’s good to move on. Four years ago I came to Japan to learn watercolour woodblock from a master carver and a master printer. It was an exhaustive education in the traditional printmaker’s skills, taught with the emphasis on techniques used for centuries to capture the beauty of the floating world of old Japan. In tune with my masters I bowed, I silently presented tea and I worked hard: I knew nothing of the process and was grateful for the exacting formality our lessons.

Now I am back in Japan working with four other artists. We’re all printmakers, we already have a fair grip of the process and we don’t so much have masters as visits from superbly skilled contemporary printmakers generous enough to share their ideas and talent. Now I find myself surrounded by new thoughts and ideas which would never have had a place back in the days when I had everything to learn.

It’s been hard to adjust: Japanese teachers who chat, laugh, hug us and show us pictures of their babies, who dot between waterbased and oil based woodblock, use Western papers as well as Japanese washi and welcome new innovations in technology. Add to that the work of my fellow artists who learned in different ways and with different methods and you can see that I’m having to shape up to a lot of new ideas.

All this is, of course, the whole point of taking a second residency. My first residency taught me all the skills I needed to begin my work in Japanese woodblock. This residency is teaching me how to shake up those skills and inject some new and creative approaches. I still made tea for my teacher this week, but this time it was Earl Grey which Katsutoshi Yuasa misses from his residency in London and we shared it over a chat about our kids.

Incidentally you can follow this residency, my work in progress, and any new printing discoveries by liking my printmaking facebook page

A room With a View

I have made it safely to my residency in Japan. After a few days of panic in Tokyo, I realised that I could always take refuge in the Tokyo Metro (pronounced in a musical sing song as ‘Toe-key-o Met-er-o’). I’ve been travelling the London Underground since I was a small child and Tokyo is really no different. That’s if you ignore the cleanliness, the abundance of public loos, the absence of delays and the polite queuing system. Oh and that there are two systems running consecutively with stations in common.

Tokyo if not conquered at least less terrifying, I have come out to the residency at Lake Kawaguchiko at the foot of Mount Fuji. There was obviously some sort of list in setting up the venue: Mount Fuji check, attendant mountains in shades of indigo check, lake to reflect both check, white egrets to pose by lake check, Buddhist shrine check… I could go on, but you get the picture. The residence itself is a story of two halves. By chance I am at the front of the building which is wood and paper, sliding screen doors, Fuji in full view and many tatami floor mats. The back is a more prosaic metal structure with views of lesser mountains, though still startlingly pretty. There are four other artists working here and together we have a marvellous studio, a library and a big communal kitchen for experimental cooking and the drinking of sake.

The residency is aimed at improving our working practise and to that end I have set myself a nightmare print in the hopes that it will improve my cutting and registration skills. It’s a nod to the art classes of my childhood and is based on the view from my bedroom window (I know, but how can I help being smug?). As you can see, I am in the middle of cutting it so I’ll keep you posted…

Des Res

In a week or so I will be setting off to Japan for an artist’s residency of several weeks to further my Japanese woodblock printing skills. At present details remain sketchy: I know I am the British artist, but don’t know who my four other companions are or which countries they will represent. Interestingly this worries me far less than the thought of crossing Tokyo. Printmakers always have plenty in common; I and the noodle sprawl of the Tokyo subway less so…

On the face of it, an artist’s residency seems like a bit of a jolly. Five weeks to indulge. Indeed, ‘aren’t you lucky’ is something I have been hearing on a very regular basis. I wouldn’t argue with the fact that I am lucky, but what I see as luck may not be the same as the luck implied in the comment. Artists like me have the luck of possessing the drive to stick with a technique and work through the catastrophes, goofs and setbacks to get to a point where we can be good enough to be considered for residencies. After that, luck is out of the equation: selection committees select, they don’t tend to pull names at random from a hat (at least I’ve never been on one that’s done that, however dull the evening and close the pub).

The residency also brings responsibility. I am giving up earnings, cancelling a workshop or two and putting family on hold to go out there. I’d better have something to show for it when I get back. I’m gambling that five weeks far from my comfort zone will result in a move forward in my work. I don’t doubt it will be a marvelous trip and I am certainly not asking for sympathy. I’m more explaining that a residency has to mark a point of change for my work or I will have failed and not be lucky at all: I’ll just have been self indulgent.

Laura Boswell ARE – Printmaker

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