PAUL Lowry has always enjoyed messing about on boats so when he decided to leave his career in print and graphic design to develop his burgeoning leatherwork business, the freedom of living and working from a narrowboat became an obvious choice. Alice Elgie caught up with Paul…
Paul explained: “Print was becoming digitised, I could see it being swallowed up by online corporations, that it was becoming about big fish eating little fish. One day I said to a workmate ‘I’m fed up with making flat images, I want to go 3D and make things that are useful, long lasting and hopefully with some beauty.’”
Teaching himself leatherwork more than four decades previously was a sideline for which his print background came in handy: “I found the cutting and colouring skills of print and graphic design to be very transferable, like using scalpels to cut film for printing plates, mixing printing inks by eye to match customer samples, and having a sense of what is pleasing.”
Paul’s first significant project was to make a cycle bag from an old leather jacket, which led to making country style bags from second-hand leather sofas: “I would turn up with a scalpel and a few tools, strip the sofa and cart it away in my old VW.”
Paul soon found himself making high-end rucksatchels but selling online was slow and having already kept a cruiser at a boat club for a number of years, it dawned on him that he could sell his house and trade off a narrowboat instead: “I moved aboard Jason, my 60ft trad, about nine years ago. It has a large front deck which is the best workplace on the canal.” Paul told me about the moment when he knew he was on to something: “I was sharing a lock with a family and sold a bag to the younger girl in one lock, then in the next lock her brother bought something, then further along their grandmother! I thought: ‘This could work.’”
Working most days, Paul will often be found creating late into the night: “This year it was dragon skin effect for belts, dog collars and wristbands. Also a feather bag/rucksack with two sets of straps; one for cross-body and also a set of rucksack straps, which makes it useful for hiking/cycling or going down the pub for a meal.”
Feathers can be found throughout Paul’s work and the significance comes from a book he once read: “It was called Jonathan Livingston Seagull about a seagull who, instead of hounding people at the seaside for their chips, would take himself off and challenge the limits of his abilities in flight.” Messages of independent thinking, freedom, self-realisation, non-conformity and true human potential abound, perhaps drawing parallels with Paul’s own path: “The author illustrated the book with small drawings of feathers and these, along with the book’s philosophy, stayed with me.”
I asked Paul about how he creates: “I mostly build things in my mind first, which allows more fireside time on the sofa.” As for his materials, after working for a week on a new design where the leather split, he sold his industrial sewing machine and started hand stitching with full grain leather: “It lasts decades, and is much stronger than genuine leather which is actually a legal term translating to having ‘some’ leather in it. You’ll see this in belts, they are rarely solid, being composed of laminations and typically last only a year or two. I use the hand saddle stitch as it’s in effect double sewn – break a thread and it won’t run and fall apart.”
If you fancy pulling up a stool and indulging in meaningful conversation as well as browsing Paul’s work, then you’ll find him continuously cruising between Leighton Buzzard and Rickmansworth where he tends to follow the RTCA floating markets, before turning around up to Braunston and heading on to the Oxford, or wherever his feathers take him…
