Artistic Inspiration

When I’m designing fabric I like to look for influence in the world around me. They teach you to look at things carefully at art college. I always remember one particular tutor asking, “What delights your eye?” I didn’t really understand it at the time. I was living in a damp student house where we had to hoover the slug trails in the morning. Nothing delighted my eye. I remember being like a petulant child, and my response to my tutor was to create an entire sketchbook filled with matches, cigarettes and ashtrays. Some of the cigarettes had lipstick on the ends, some didn’t. Some matches were burnt out some were still pink. The ashtray was clear glass so there were reflections. I answered her brief but in such a ridiculously art student-y pretentious way that I’d totally missed the joy.

In retrospect, what I needed to do was observe the wider world around me. But when you’re indoors in a very wet inner-city Manchester and you’re skint and a bit stuck in a rut, that’s sometimes a very difficult thing to do.

I hope I’ve learned to answer my tutor’s brief now. I get it. With British Boxers I pull influence from everything that I’ve find beautiful around me –whether that’s looking to Scotland at herringbones and tweed or pulling in the colour of the earth, grass and heather that we see in the Staffordshire Moorlands where I live. Or even looking at a Victorian seaside town with its piles of sweets in a tourist shop or its puddles and reflections in the rain. The influences around me can be wide and varied, but the habit I’ve learned is to look for the joy. And I hope that I can bring that to some of my textiles. Above is a throwaway shot of a blue boathouse door in Cambridge. Next to it is some unremarkable 1980’s red brick, and in front of that you can see sunlight catching on the tips of weeping willow branches. Those three colours together are sublime. It’s noticing them and then being able to push design into something beautiful to show you that’s the important bit.

I’ll introduce each new fabric to you as we progress through the season, but for now, if you see something you like on the website then please use the code AUTUMN24 on british-boxers.com and you’ll get 20% OFF.