PROFILE
Stroke of Genius
There are many ways to track history. Jaye Boswell has a unique way of cataloging it using business logos, restaurant menus, newspaper advertising and related artifacts— each item a time capsule of our stroll through life. The longtime Sanibel artist has a big collection of hand-illustrated menu covers; sheets of logo and slogan designs; campaign, resort, perfume and medical advertising; posters and playful greeting cards; recreational and yacht club brochures, handbills and handouts; and clipped magazine fashion ads from the past 50 years, 35 of them on Sanibel.
The collection is a portfolio of her work as an illustrator dating to the 1960s.
Today a more whimsical painter, Boswell recently shared five decades of her pen-and-ink illustrations with a morning group of the San-Cap Kiwanis Club. Much of it represented commercial art on Sanibel and Captiva, created by her twoperson business, Sketch Pad. The body of work is an archive of the many island merchants and tourist interests that have either stayed or vanished. She also showed the Kiwanis group illustrations for print advertising she drew in Miami, San Francisco and New York City.
Though she was supposed to talk to the group about wildlife art, Boswell instead came to the Kiwanians with an illustrated history of Sanibel and Captiva. “The guys,” Kiwanian Jerry Edelman says, “asked lots of questions. Normally when we stay quiet, we don’t care. It was amazing.”
Boswell is known nationally for introducing the Federal Junior Duck Stamp Program, modeled on what J.N. “Ding” Darling did for the adult stamp in the 1930s. She originated the junior contest in 1989 at The Sanibel School, where she was the art teacher for many years. Thousands of children entered their wildlife drawings this year for judging on Earth Day at the J.N. “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge. Boswell received an award at the event.
But to her friends and associates, the former Jaye Harken was an illustrator of note in the lost art of print fashion. Early in her career Boswell was placed in a Manhattan studio with three others, sketching children’s wear advertising, later drawing languid and lanky women for designers such as Bonwit Teller and Lord & Taylor, her graceful pen conveying eloquence in a few fluid strokes. She has also drawn rock band posters and greeting cards, some of which she later found in reverse print, a tactic used by counterfeiters to avoid prosecution.
Boswell’s career got its start during her New Jersey childhood, when she used crayons to express a creativity that has rainbowed into 2016―today drawing characters and situations for a Sanibel children’s author, as well as her more whimsical beach and wildlife work shown at the Sanibel Library. Upon obtaining an art degree from the University of Miami, Boswell traveled from New York City to Hawaii, California and the Virgin Islands before heading back to Miami, ultimately settling on Sanibel in 1981 with husband, Bill, and a pair of sons.
Though she has her own accomplished career, Boswell is more comfortable talking about her husband’s accounting business and her son the airline pilot, or about dolphin tours, summer heat and her next life as a jellyfish. “I have great memories,” she concedes, “and I’m so blessed to have them.”