CHANGE IN STYLE

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30760, 26 May 1965, Page 7

CHANGE IN STYLE

An exhibition which has opened in the New Vision Centre, a West End art gallery reveals a new change in style by James Boswell, one of the older and most successful New Zealand painters in Britain.

He admits that he has made a “complete breakaway” from his previous abstract canvasses and earlier realism to abstracts derived from machines and the “space age.” Born in Westport in 1906, Mr Boswell spent a short time at the Elam School of Art in Auckland and came to London in 1925 where he was a student at the Royal College of Art for four years. He worked as a landscape painter and had work shown in various exhibitions before he gave up painting in 1932, and became engrossed with graphic design and drawing of a satirical or reportage kind. He took part in the Artists’ International Association exhibitions through the ’thirties, not as a painter but a draughtsman interested in political and social satire. After five years in the Army, as a radiographer in the Medical Corps, he exhibited in London some of his drawings of Army life in the deserts of the Middle East. A number of his drawings are in the Imperial War Museum collection. He went back to his former position as art director for the Shell Petroleum Company for a short time but then went to Fleet street as art editor for “Lilliput” magazine. Since 1953, he has undertaken various freelance activities as painter, graphic designer and industrial journalist. In the 1950’s he began to paint again in a strictly realistic style, believing this the most effective way of mastering the principles of painting. Many of these works were shown at the Royal Academy, the London Group, and other mixed exhibitions in London and elsewhere.

From 1957 he produced abstract paintings with a pronounced spatial feeling which were also shown in various exhibitions. A collection of this work shown in the Drian Gallery, of London’s West End, in 1962, showed that Mr Boswell was also interested in luminous colour effects—predominant colours were black

[From the London Correspondent of "The Press’’]

and gold, with free use of metallic paints to achieve dark and sombre effects. Among these paintings were the “Tasman” series, based on recollections of flying across the Tasman on a visit back to New Zealand in the late forties. One of these, “Maui’s Fish,” was recently acquired by the Hocken Collection in Dunedin. By contrast, Mr Boswell’s latest exhibition abounds with

rich, sonorous colours, vivid reds and lush blues and white. “My style has changed fairly dramatically,” he said.

Titles of the paintings reveal the reason—such titles as “A Bouquet for an Astronaut” (two versions), “Free Fall,”

“Gemini,” and “From the harbours of the Moon.” Mr Boswell became fascinated with a television presentation of the preparations and blast-off of the American astronauts in a “Project Gemini” satellite. The “space” paintings resulted. There are other paintings inspired by machines and technological origins. The photograph shows “The Cold Machine.”

Mr Boswell has a home in Westbourne terrace, London, but paints at his house-studio at Hove, on the south coast,

because of the bad light in London. He is married with a daughter and two grandchildren.