About Laura Boswell
Laura Boswell is a printmaker based on the West Coast of Scotland. Her work is an exploration of space, scale and light in wild landscape. Laura's travels and residencies in Japan, studying traditional Japanese printmaking, have had a profound effect on her approach to printmaking. Laura's prints have their foundation in observational drawing and photography but are not direct geographic representations. They are a result of her response to the location, the season and weather. The prints are an open interpretation, reminding the viewer of their own experiences of wild places.
In the studio, Laura reinterprets the landscape into a design drawing in pencil which is transferred to the block for cutting. Laura works mainly with the reduction technique, using one block which she cuts away as she prints the colour layers. This is an irreversible process that destroys the block as the print is created. It allows Laura to be very flexible in her processes; by using multiple layers of transparent ink and a single block, Laura can work on the print like a painter, adjusting colour and design elements as the work develops. Laura uses a variety of materials to add to her initial transfer drawing and her prints rely on precise cutting of her drawn and painted lines and marks. Laura experiments constantly with a mix of linocut, mokuhanga (Japanese woodblock) and Western woodblock and is currently working with monoprints combining mokulito (wood lithography) and lino, lino and drawn line.
Laura Boswell is a member of the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers. Her book ‘Making Japanese Woodblock Prints’ was published by Crowood Press in 2019. Laura's second
book ‘Linocut and Reduction Printing, Design and Techniques’ came out in 2022. Laura's prints feature in national collections including the The House of Lords, and the National Library of Wales and Buckinghamshire County Museum. She also has prints
in the Nagasawa Art Park collection and the MI-Lab Print Collection in Japan.
Further Images
Carrick Coast (Linocut - 340 x 515 mm)
White Rock, Black Rock (Linocut - 340 x 515 mm)
Summer shadows (Linocut - 340 x 515 mm)
Tide Pool Rockcliffe Beach (Linocut - 450 x 600 mm)
Sketchbook Study, Winter (Linocut - 400 x 185 mm)
West Coast choppy (Linocut - 300 x220 mm)