My Boschabet
Tue 1st Oct 2013
It’s been a busy summer. Alongside the job in Copenhagen I have been printing the letters, O.T & V of an animal Boschabet.
This autumn’s big exhibition at Compton Verney Art Gallery in Warwickshire, is Curious Beasts: Animal Prints from the British Museum. Taking inspiration from this, and from the Enid Marx-Margaret Lambert collection of graphics and British popular arts held at Compton Verney, nine printmakers from Leicester Print Workshop were commissioned to make A Fantastical Animal Alphabet.
One of my greatest joys over the last year has been going to pottery. I have been making a series of pieces based on ‘things’ found in Hieronymus Bosch paintings. I just love working with clay and making physical objects. But that’s another story for a later news bulletin.
I mention these pottery pieces because when the call for proposal for the Fantastical Animal Alphabet was made I knew immediately what I wanted to do. To further explore my Bosch obsession and to make a Boschabet.
The letters were randomly divided amongst the nine selected printmakers. I got O, T and V. I was delighted; I would make three small books with one letter per book. The assignment of non-sequential letters suited a Boschabet, as it is not the same as a conventional alphabet. A Boschabet flows by a different rhyme and has groupings or cluster of letters.
Everything and anything is plausible to a child, nothing more fantastical or unlikely than the next thing. So neither the strange animals nor singular letter books would seem out of the ordinary.
I named the animals that I created rather informally, giving them Flemish Christian names. Please come and meet Otto, Timon, Volphari, and their friends at Compton Verney between Saturday 5th October and Sunday 15th December.
