In the early 1990s I was a student on the MA Fine Art Alternative Media course at Chelsea College of Art and Design, and unfortunately I liked jokes. Unfortunately because jokes in art were Not A Thing, and certainly not a thing in the pressure-cooker environment of a London MA Fine Art course at the time where in the shadow of the recent YBA explosion being Serious And Professional About Your Art and Producing Large Collectable Product was the only acceptable modus operandi.
But I liked making disposable photocopied posters of Ludwig Wittgenstein appearing in Spot The Ball competitions, trying to re-enrol myself on the course as a pair of elderly artists, and making socks moan about how badly treated they were by everyone while espousing utterly dreadful views themselves. I liked making jokes and I liked making art and I could see a continuum between the two disciplines.
But back then at least this was Not The Way To Do It. I was never going to win the Turner Prize, never going to appear in Frieze, never going to be even glanced at by any of the hot critics or curators of the day.
And yet among its staff Chelsea did have a Patron Saint of Lost Causes, and his name was (and, as of this writing, still is) Kevin Atherton. And I was lucky enough to have him as my tutor.
Kevin patiently put up with my hare-brained attempts to put square pegs into round holes, and over the short months of the MA course imparted his wisdom in ways that were outside the art-conventional. One of which was suggesting I read John Lahr's book about Barry Humphries, Dame Edna Everage And The Fall Of Western Civilisation, and Humphries' autobiography More Please.
Naturally at that point in time Humphries and Dame Edna (and to a certain extent his other major creation Sir Les Patterson) were well known to me and anyone in the UK who turned on a TV in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But I didn't know anything about how Humphries started out or where his creations came from. And while the John Lahr book sketched out some details, the autobiography was a revelation for me at that time. Because essentially it described how to be an artist in a society when you find that society inherently absurd and therefore ripe for sending-up.
At university in Melbourne, while studying - crucially - law, philosophy and fine art, Humphries became enthralled by Dada, the proto-surrealist movement that emerged after World War One and was to a great degree a reflection of and reaction to the absurdity of a world that could blithely send millions of people to their deaths on the whims of a pathetically detached powerful few.
Though Dada's art exhibits and cabarets were headline-grabbers at the time and inspired a modest wave of satire across Switzerland, Austria and Germany (Peter Cook would later quip however that the Berlin satirical cabarets of the 1930s "did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the Second World War"), these days Dada is appreciated solely as a collection of artefacts in museums, from Francis Picabia's machine diagrams to Marcel Duchamp's famous urinal. And this was certainly the case too when Humphries was starting out. But he realised that despite its cultural ossification, Dada still had something to offer, even in Melbourne in the 1950s. Especially in Melbourne in the 1950s.
Because what Humphries found around him was a staid society where going along to get along was the only way to get along. Where there were no 'rules' as such beyond the law... but there were rules. There were things you did do, and things you didn't. And if you didn't look like you were trying to do the things you were supposed to do, then that was as bad as not doing them at all.
Humphries found this attempting to conform absurd, and his instinct as an artist was to find it funny. And luckily he was able to create humour from this funniness. First as neo-Dadaist artworks - record players stuck playing the same few seconds of a song, a pair of wellies filled up with custard made to look like something revolting - then as performances. One particular favourite of his was to dress as a tramp and hide up his sleeve an amount of Russian Salad - diced vegetables in mayonnaise. Then he'd go out into a busy area of the city, and pretend to throw up. Cue shock and disgust from the passers-by... which would then be redoubled when he took out a fork and started eating the 'vomit' from the pavement.
These were great one-off japes, and stuck a fork - literally - into the everyday life of the inhabitants of Melbourne. But his satirical inclinations really came into their own and created something memorable, repeatable and extensible when he had the inspiration to create Edna Everage.
While touring Australia with the Melbourne Theatre Company he used to improvise characters in the back of the tour bus, and one of these was a reflection of the kind of very proper, upstanding conservative people from local theatre appreciation groups and councils tasked with greeting the visiting theatre troupe who had the lofty job of bringing Great Art in the form of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night to their corner of the country. Such people were desperate to appear cultured, but at the same time not to appear arty or fanciful, and this caused them to speak and act in self-sabotagingly ludicrous ways. Humphries saw in these people a symptom of something larger than the people themselves, and over the weeks to come forged them into single character, Edna Everage (a play on the word Average).
Over the years of course he extended Edna's backstory and scope until the became first Dame Edna then Dame Edna Everage, Megastar. But throughout the character's life and her interactions with audience members and celebrities alike she remained a vehicle for him to channel his hilarity and underlying appreciation of the absurdity that he observed in society and culture around him.
Reading about all this in Humphries' autobiography back then, sitting in my 'studio space' in Chelsea (actually a section of a corridor, the better to observe the passing attitudes of students, staff and visiting artists alike), I realised there were great similarities between his thought processes and my own because they were coming out of the same area, the same ability to perceive absurdity and find it noteworthy and amusing, and rather than let that fizzle away to want to create something new out of it. 15 years previously, people in the same situation would have had the Sex Pistols to inspire them. I had Dame Edna and her gladioli. And I was, and continue to be, more than happy with that.
If you're an artist, I urge you to read his book.
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I wanted to make a series of prints about record shops/stores but without it being about particular ones. This set of work wasn't going to be an encyclopaedia, it was going to be a novel. So I made them all up, but filled them with the knowledge I'd gleaned over many decades of record shopping (plus my 1970s childhood feeling that the USA was the coolest place on Earth).
My love of ephemera, and the tiny random details of something telling you more about it than its direct pronouncements, led me to come up with the idea of making up price stickers. These were a tiny opportunity for record stores to put their own name and branding on the face of the product that they got from The Man. Nice one. Often totally vernacular and charming too. But how would they look? I researched the shapes they came in, the layouts - here's a sheet from my notebook:
A majority of circles. So I went with that. But I like working in rectangles - posters are the most incredible art form - so how to bring the two together?
First I thought about the Marber grid, named for Romek Marber the amazing designer, typographer & illustrator who created this layout for Penguin Books in the early 1960s:
...which is how we get this:
Utterly beautiful in the way that utterly functional things can sometimes be.
But I've been on a bit of a Penguin Books break recently, so I decided to go back a bit further and indulge my love of Swiss International Style graphic design, but in a very basic way. Basically dividing the page up proportionally to the subject matter and using Akzidenz Grotesk. And so...
Using this layout allowed me space to add in extra information. Well, I could have left it blank, but where's the fun in that? So I decided that each print should become a minimal potted history of a record store. It should show which city it was in, what kind of music it stocked - its main sections - and when it traded. That last one was important. Here was a chance to talk about how music, how we get and consume music, has changed over the years. Different formats, different genres, specialisation, broadenisation (yes I just made that up), all the kinds of things these places have had to deal with over the years, until we get to now.
So with Pop's Pop Shop, in Hoboken, New Jersey (I've always loved that name), here's what we get:
They started off in the early 1970s selling chart stuff, maybe expanded a bit, got a jazz section, sold some cassettes maybe in the 1980s, then eventually CDs... and they managed to go all the way through to 1998. So that's a pretty healthy life for a record store. Who knows what happened then - a novel doesn't tell you everything about its characters, just about their spirit.
Let's look at another close-up:
I love this stuff. Local printers. Printing your short run of a few thousand stickers. On their not-too-high-tech machinery. Maybe out of 5,000 stickers 4,500 are good. 500 of them have ink smears, there's ink starve, there's mess and other errors. But you still use them because who cares right? As long as the customers can see the price, job done. And that's what works for me. When printing isn't a centralised mass-produced perfect thing but a local, best-we-can-do-under-the-circumstances, compromised but still working thing. So all these prints have their little printing quirks. This stuff is gorgeous, it's what makes them worth looking at again and again for years. Always lots of stuff for the eye to see, that's my mantra.
So there you have it. I loved putting these prints together, I hope you'll love them too. Go check them out.
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So here's my latest print, a portrait of the great French film director Jean-Luc Godard. You can buy it here.
You'll see it's a bit different than my other portraits. Where usually I've used pen and ink with a lot of ink wash, here the line is more definite with halftones doing the work of the wash for tone.
Like a lot of people my understanding of Godard's work began in the 1980s when Channel 4 in the UK screened many of his films late at night over the course of a few weeks. These weren't just his more palatable classics like À bout de souffle but some of the more difficult 1970s stuff like Number Two. And later in the 1980s I rented Week-end from the local video shop and was utterly fascinated by it. Godard's work is never comfortable, even in the comfortable bits, and that's a very good thing.
You can see more here.
]]>In December 1976 Sideburns, a fanzine put together by and for the group The Stranglers, featured this now-famous graphic. All you needed was three chords, and you could start a band. It absolutely epitomised punk's DIY, sod-the-system ethos and remains a source of great inspiration and encouragement.
Punk may be dead (there, I've said it), but its spirit must live on, and not just on the guitar. Believing as I do that the creative spark must be allowed to find its own weird form and not be forced to follow historically entrenched trains of thought, I've transposed the Sideburns graphic into the very un-punk world of classical music:
It's partly a parody, sure, but with the arts increasingly becoming the preserve of a privileged few, not only in terms of the audience but those who practise (and are allowed to practise), it's a reminder that the arts need life kicked into them every so often. Put this print on your wall and you might end up being just the person to do that. Good luck.
The print is available here. Oh and here's another punk parody print to put in your basket too.
]]>This is Sand Dune from 1983. At some point in the early 1980s Bacon - that master of the accidental brushstroke - started using spray cans. And in reproduction these works look extremely duff - too smooth, too blended, just inert. But up close, in real life, it's possible to see how Bacon wasn't using the spray cans as a time-saver but as another source of imprecision and accident.
You can see here how Bacon uses the texture of the canvas (famously it was always the unprimed back of the canvas he painted on) with the edge spatter of the spray can to create more surface incident, not less.
An even better example comes in his Study of a Bull from 1991, not long before Bacon died:
And there's more in his cover-version of his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, originally from 1944, covered here in 1988:
Beyond this, the show was an opportunity to see several of Bacon's works where he'd used Letraset dry transfer lettering on the canvas:
And I'll end with this oddity, Street Scene (with Car in Distance), from 1984:
For more information check out the Centre Pompidou website. Oh, and did you know Bacon was also a jazz band leader? Neither did anyone else, but that didn't stop me putting together this fantastic concert poster.
]]>The Swiss painter Félix Vallotton was the subject of a recent small-scale exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. Associated with the Nabis, I’ve always kind of liked his patterny paintings (though Bonnard was head and shoulders above him). But the problem with Vallotton, as with a bunch of painters of his generation or thereabouts, was that he could draw graphically, but not in his paintings. In his paintings his drawing was pretty awful. And similarly in his sketches. But set him to work on a more designy task, and he was pretty darn good. And the RA show demonstrated this well, with a set of prints (I think they were lino prints, it’s a few weeks since now and the show has faded in the memory) that were really enjoyable. Especially prints of crowds, where he’s allowed his use of black shapes to coalesce into natural-looking blobs of massed humanity. Here are a few more examples:
By contrast, here are a few of his paintings. First from a tryptich of shoppers in a department store - kudos for Modern-ism here:
...and then there’s the following, which is typical of his patterning/flat areas of colour style, which often (but not always) works in theory better than in practise.
I mean, it’s lovely, but I think I know which area of his work I’d prefer to spend my Untold Billions on.
]]>Among the many things to enjoy (if that’s the right word) about the HBO/Sky series ‘Chernobyl’ is the font used for the title cards. Apparently it’s a bespoke rendering of an old Soviet font known as Zhurnalnaya roublennaya and was created by the director Johan Renck (and his brother). Renck is a prolific music video director (incl. Bowie’s ‘Blackstar’) though you may also remember him as chart-bothering popstrel Stakka Bo out of the nineties, yo.
Zhurnalnaya roublennaya was the font we chose for our own Chernobyl poster which is available here on our website.
]]>This terrific Penguin cover caught my eye recently while putting some new prints together. Look at the chaps left and right - both are moments away from disaster. Yikes!
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Ben Nicholson (obviously)
Add a green and a reddish-brown and you've got an early Thérèse Oulton.
Matta, or possibly John Tunnard.
How Clyfford Still started every one of his paintings.
That weird wibbly-wobbly phase Jean Dubuffet went through at the end of the '50s/start of the '60s.
]]>A recent wander round Tate Britain led to me snapping some of my favourite paintings there. Like the above, Peter Blake's Self-Portrait With Badges from 1961. The whole painting is wonderful and painted with a variety of techniques and to varying levels of finish. Peter Blake turned the act of slacking-off three quarters of the way through a painting into an art.
David Bomberg's Bomb Store from 1942, painted while serving as a war artist, is crammed with the forceful chunkiness that's in all his best work.
Charles Ginner's Piccadilly Circus from 1912, which is as flat as a Paint By Numbers kit and all the more charming for it.
Here's another Camden Town Group member doing his Post-Impressionist thing: Malcolm Drummond's Girl With Palmettes from 1914. Flat areas of colour, a nice subtle arrangement of complementaries, all good.
Another War Artist piece. Graham Sutherland's Feeding A Steel Furnace from 1941-2. That pink, yellow, orange and black combination comes up again and again in immediate post-War art. Sutherland used it, Bacon used it a lot until he hit the '60s and whacked up the saturation levels on everything.
Victor Pasmore, The Hanging Gardens of Hammersmith, No. 1 from 1944-7. It's not often you get early Mondrian and late Seurat in the same painting. Bonus.
John Bratby's Still Life With Chip Frier, 1954. Bratby's simple drawing technique in paint is always a winner, even when it isn't. And you can just smell Albert Finney and Tom Courtney standing just out of shot. Aye.
]]>1960s advertising & editorial photography is just so captivating. Especially when it's pitched as aspirational & 'upmarket'. Sketchbooks at the ready...
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The Picasso 1932 exhibition that's currently running at Tate Modern (til 9 September 2018) is a bit of an oddity. The Tate's strapline for the show, 'Love, Fame, Tragedy' tries to lend it an air of epic importance. But the work on display is pretty humdrum stuff. Charming, yes; offputting, occasionally, but not epic. But that doesn't mean there isn't much to pique one's curiosity here.
I won't run through the whole story here, the Tate will fill you in on the details, but basically in 1932 Picasso had hit 50, he'd achieved fame and wealth, and was in the middle of having an affair with a woman less than half his age (who is the model, or at least subject, of much of the work on show here). So by this point you'd had Blue Period Picasso, Rose Period Picasso, Cubist Picasso, Classicist Picasso and Pseudo-surrealist Picasso. He'd done a lot. And now it was time to take the foot off the gas for a bit.
Essentially at this stage Picasso could fart and someone would pay a few thousand francs for it, and so in this show we're treated to a lot of Phoning It In Picasso, all playing off former glories. Such as this:
...and this:
...and, er, this:
There's a fair amount of Just Chilling Picasso in the show. Picasso had recently bought himself a château in Normandy, Boisgeloup, to which he was chauffeur driven whenever he wanted to get away from Paris. There he set up a sculpture studio (some of the best works in the show are the sculptures) and kicked back by painting charming confections like the one at the top of this piece, and the one below, both views of the locality in the rain:
As I mentioned before, the show does have a fair amount of curiosities that illustrate the How of his life at the time as well as the What. Like this unfinished (presumably) painting where he'd noted down on the canvas the colours he eventually couldn't be arsed to fill in:
(As a side note: the set of unfinished or minimal pieces that share the room with the above pieces are interesting in that they demonstrate how refined Picasso's brushwork and ideas became the further along each painting went. His 'line', as distinctive and confident as that of Walt Disney, starts off hesitant and uncertain, shaky even):
Here's Picasso painting on a cardboard box. Because why not?:
And here's Picasso coming over all Henry Hill from 'Goodfellas' when trying to get a gallery in Zurich to make good. I think this pretty much translates as "F*ck you, pay me":
Perhaps the best things in the show are towards the end, a series of drawings on the theme of the Crucifixion. Here we see Picasso thinking through drawing, which is always fascinating. Note the similarity between the final drawing here and basically everything Graham Sutherland ever did:
So there you have it. In a way it's a heartening show, because it demonstrates to any artist who visits that even though we might strive to make every piece we make a masterpiece, the masters themselves could't help but make dodgy work at least 75% of the time. Relax!
]]>These drawings are in Conté crayon (a B grade), which is my preferred medium for quick sketching - it can provide everything from whispy greys to intense strong black lines, and it’s ideal for the more dramatic end of things. As ever when I sit down to draw something, the first drawing fixes a kind of map of the subject with as much detail as I can stomach. Knowing when to stop with this first drawing is key, both for avoiding boredom in the viewer and more specifically the artist, and also for preventing overloading the image with too much useless information. I’m trying to get what the subject is about more than what it is.
The second drawing is quicker, uses more space on the page and is starting to pare away at the subject leaving only what’s truly interesting to me - the stocky branch that goes up then immediately to the right as it comes off the trunk, the spindliness of the branches, the leaves being only at the ends of the branches, but also with a sense of how even though it’s winter and there’s not a lot of foliage, there are enough branches to make the tree a pretty busy subject. This second drawing is getting more towards what I would want from a drawing, but it’s not quite there yet.
The third and final drawing gets it. There’s an overall shape. There’s points of interest (usually where something changes in some way, a change of direction, shape or mass). There’s a feeling of the sparse-yet-complex thing I mentioned above. And there’s a feeling of the tree having some mass and presence in space, in three dimensions. This is the drawing style I’ve used since right at the start of my art education in the mid-1800s. It’s not exactly a shorthand - shorthand’s intention is to record all sounds uttered, and this isn’t that. But it’s a précis. It does its job and doesn’t outstay its welcome.
]]>The Jean-Michel Basquiat show at the Barbican in London at the moment is kind of mid-sized and kind of mid-weight. It’s set over two floors. The upper floor, the one you go through first, is the early work, and the lower floor is the later stuff. The good thing here is there’s far more early stuff than later stuff, and it’s far more varied in terms of its scope, materials and approach. The downside though is that the late work downstairs is outnumbered, leading to the show feeling a bit lopsided. But that to some extent is down to a change in medium at this point in his career - bigger and bigger canvases to feed the ever more ravenous appetites of New York collectors, because as we know in many instances art is priced and sold by the square yard.
Still, there are plenty of gems here. One early drawing in particular caught my eye - this one entitled ‘Rene Ricard’ (the art critic who wrote the ‘Radiant Child’ article that boosted Basquiat):
And in the downstairs section, this drawing ‘Young Picasso - Old Picasso’, which raised a smile:
Details of opening times for the venue can be found here. Go and see it. We’ll probably have to wait another 10 or 15 years for another sizeable Basquiat show.
]]>I've spent the latter half of August working on new prints for the Autumn & Winter season, and in between the various processes I like to do a bit of directionless drawing, just for fun. Here's one I did the other afternoon of my favourite mug - a Kellogg's Frosted Flakes (or 'Frosties' as they're known in the UK) promo item. Just because.
]]>This year's Expedition was to the Isle of Wight, and much of the best & most interesting signage was to be found at the local Steam Railway. It's incredibly well-run and well-preserved, with huge amounts to interest those with an interest in graphic design, typography and time travel (mind you, the whole Isle of Wight fits that latter category, as there's a certain yesterdayness about the whole place). The cottages on the way in to the railway all had concrete numbers outside them. Much more impressive than the typical brass numbers bought from a DIY shop.
Inside one of the workshops where restoration works-in-progress were on display was this rather alarmingly named 'Nuclear Fred' engine. I didn't have my Geiger counter on my, so I couldn't verify the claim.
The lion in the old British Railways crest looks distinctly unhappy to be there. And those numerals look like they won't stand for much messing either.
The super type on this goods wagon is set off nicely by the grey background - grey proving itself once again to be the most indispensable colour.
Nothing says the 1950s more than an information poster printed in a single shade of green.
Talking of green, here's the classic combination of gree, white and red that instantly evokes someone with Brylcreem'd hair in a thick single-breasted suit shouting 'You - yes you - don't do that. Now, clear off'.
Finally, from the real to the also-real-but-smaller, this carriage in amongst the hundreds in the humongous model railway in Yarmouth stood out for its utter simplicity. I'd like to think this design was from the 1970s, but who knows, the way design ideas go around it might be from last week.
]]>I found this on one of our bookshelves today (I didn't even know we had it, which shows you how utterly vast the Standard Designs Memorial Library is). It's an exhibition catalogue from 1964: Jackson Pollock at Marlborough-Gerson in New York.
It was a pretty extensive show by the looks of things. 149 pieces are listed, and look at that - 'some of the works in this exhibition are for sale'. So, time to go shopping. First though, check out the cover in detail:
It's a silver-coated card cover with a transparent plastic sleeve onto which is printed the text and artwork (the strange patterns beneath that are just from ageing, humidity etc., though they have their own appropriately Pollock-like look). It's an absolutely up-to-the-minute cover for 1964, which suggests a canny move on the part of Marlborough, who have always been masters of promoting their artists: sell work which is getting past its Best Before date using the very Pop Art tools that are killing it off.
Inside, the pieces start with his 1933 Self Portrait (the potato-headed one), and trundle on through his post Thomas Hart Benson phase before kicking into the really good stuff around 1946 from halfway. There's quite a bit of good, but also some of the forehead-slapping moves that occurred increasingly (poor chap, I do feel for him) towards the end of his career.
I love his simple black-paint-on-white work a lot, even after the 1940s, and this one fits right in on my fantasy must-buy list. However...
...this 'Portrait And A Dream' stuff has always been the sign of someone desperate to break out of the corner they'd splashed themselves into, and it's difficult to look at in some ways. Though it's not totally without charm.
Much though I love anything from the late 1940s with a dark brown background, this, Jackson, is a real WTF?
But there are some hugely impressive works in amongst all this. Such as...
'Cathedral' from 1947, bang in the centre of his greatest period. I'd not seen this piece before, and it's stunning.
I'm so glad I found this catalogue in our Library today - I've been looking at it all afternoon. Who knows what I'll find when I explore the East Wing (closed Thursdays)...?
]]>That reminds me, have you seen our album-as-books print of Kraftwerk's 'The Man-Machine'?
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