Tuesday 30 October 2007

Halloween – a Great Marketing Opportunity


Long recognised across the Atlantic as one of the great seasonal festivals of commerce, it took many years to fix Halloween into the same position in the UK.
The job’s well and truly done by now and there’s only 24 hours to go before the least spontaneous and most manufactured event in the nation’s calendar of celebrations. According to wikipedia, it is the third most profitable season for UK supermarkets with a total spend in 2006 of £120 million. American consumption is immense. Follow this link to see how 2007 is going to turn out. To celebrate this dubious occasion we have some examples of mid-century American advertising directed at children above and adults below. The more you eat – the more you want. Who’s putting crack in the Cracker Jack?

Wednesday 24 October 2007

Postcards of the Day No. 8 & 9


Two favourite cards of the same location in Los Angeles. Two different angles but both present a theatrical image of the urban highway. The vehicles appear to be of different vintage so there may also be some separation in time. The lack of sharp definition plus the unreality of retouched colour values combine to create a dreamlike atmosphere as if we are staring at a dimly recalled frame from a Hollywood movie. I never tire of this type of image in which the harsh reality of glaring sunlight, kerosene fumes and swirling road dust is all eliminated by the sweet caress of a well aimed airbrush leaving behind a filtered and sanitised vision suitable for a vacation souvenir. After all, this is Elysian Park, the last resting place of souls.

Monday 22 October 2007

Christopher Wormell


This is a fan letter to an artist whose books are an unadulterated pleasure to the eye. I’m not going to survey his entire output but focus on the books I’ve collected for myself. There is no active book illustrator who is better for clarity of design, simplicity of presentation, and vibrancy of colour. Most of his books are made for children but they all possess visual qualities to delight even the most jaded eye. A useful biographical note can be found here.


His output falls into 3 main categories. Starting in 1997 with Blue Rabbit and Friends there is an extensive series of mass market story books for children with titles like Henry and the Fox, The Saddest King, George And The Dragon, Two Frogs, and Off to the Fair. Well told tales with cheerfully competent drawings in a combination of colour washes and line, they have many qualities to make them attractive to children but they lack the visual impact that makes the large picture books so distinctive. This is not intended to be dismissive but simply to place them in context. Next is a smaller group of books illustrated in a traditional wood engraving manner. Examples of this include Mowgli's Brothers and English Country Traditions. These productions reflect a high degree of technical mastery and a genuine respect for a traditional craft. The ability to render form and texture in this most demanding medium is admirable but overall they are not so effective when it comes to visual rhythms and a sense of movement. The surfaces and forms seem to exist in an airless atmosphere; they need a fraction of additional space into which to expand and animate. Finally, there is a growing series of large format primers with bold and dynamic full page colour illustrations. These are by some distance his greatest achievements and maintain the highest overall standard of quality.


This series began in 1990 with the publication of An Alphabet of Animals. It established a generously proportioned square format with full page four colour lino-cut illustrations with black borders which with some modifications has lasted to the present. The appeal of apparent simplicity and the revitalization of a traditional form was immediately recognised and the book won the Graphics Prize at the Bologna Book Fair in 1990. A Number of Animals followed in 1994, published by Jonathan Cape in a yellow embossed cloth binding with a wraparound pictorial dust jacket displaying an image not included in the body of the book. This volume introduced the device of a small character (a chick in this case) that appears somewhere in every image. The practice has been maintained through the life of the series and makes a minor but continuing contribution to the sense of visual wit inherent in the work.


The series continued with the New Alphabet of Animals in 2000 and Teeth, Tails and Tentacles in 2004. Mice, Morals and Monkey Business was published in 2005, followed by Through the Animals’ Eyes in 2006. The latest volume, Wings, Horns and Claws appeared in September 2007. Handsomely produced in cloth bindings with printed labels inlaid on the front, these books have been published by the Running Press in Philadelphia and there is no sign as yet that the formula is becoming stale. The design and page layouts have an air of classic simplicity that allows the images to speak for themselves. The books have a sense of internal rhythm created by alternating single images and double page images interspersed with text. The images are then repeated either as vignettes at the back with additional text or employed on reduced scale between the endpapers and the title page. This all serves to enhance the process of absorbing the imagery.


CW learned his wood engraving skills from his father and never attended art college. He is largely self taught but has a keen awareness of the long traditions of book illustration for children. There is an interview in which he talks about this and other matters that can be read by clicking here. There are echoes in his work of Japanese wood-block prints and some affinities with the prints of Bonnard and the woodcuts of Raoul Dufy. Like Dufy in his illustrations to Apollinaire’s Le Bestiaire, he is a master of the power of line, controlling the width, weight and direction to describe and enclose form and texture as well as intensifying colour sensation. Image placement in relation to the pictorial frame is judged with perfect finesse. Decisions about whether to contain a form within the frame or whether to crop are expertly made. Even more impressive is the unerring ability to make the areas of flat saturated colour, the negative shapes, work to maintain tension in the image. It is this quality that is reminiscent of Bonnard especially when large and small forms are contrasted within the same image. All these, in combination with a flair for developing movement within the image are calculated to exercise and delight the eye.


I also have a few items that lie outside these three categories of book. Mediterranean Flavours is a cookbook, published in 1995 and lavishly illustrated in colour lino-cuts by CW. The images of tomatoes and aubergines, peppers and olives, lemons and pomegranates and sardines and squid ornament the pages with wonderfully intense colour contained within supple and rhythmic contours. Labels is a small card covered 34 page book, published in 1997 with a text by Louis de Bernières, a brief first person narrative describing an unlikely instance of compulsive behaviour leading to wealth and fortune. CW contributed small atypical line drawings, one to sit opposite each page of text plus a more characteristic single colour lino-cut on the book’s theme of tinned cat food to decorate the front and back cover.


In 2005 Adnams Brewery launched a poster and magazine advertising campaign under the slogan, “Beer From The Coast” with full colour seaside imagery from CW. I saw them first as full page ads in the Guardian Weekend magazine where they positively leapt off the page, surrounded as they were by the usual visual mediocrity. On a train trip a few months later I saw them as full size posters effortlessly dominating the suburban platforms along the track leading to Waterloo. Once again, they looked stupendous, in a class of their own in the company of ads for mobile networks and financial services. Adnams made much of this rich vein of material on their website and for a while were marketing prints, postcards, mouse mats and mugs bearing CW’s images. The posters brilliantly evoke the breezy, sunlit horizons of the East Anglian coast in a series of visual puns in which bottle tops stand in for pebbles, shells, limpets, and sails while beer bottles stand in for bollards and groynes. It was an opportunity for CW to make use of a pictorial language hitherto exclusively applied to natural forms, on the built environment and man-made objects. Contemporary illustrators rarely get an opportunity like this and seeing his work widely reproduced on such a massive scale must have been a source of great satisfaction. Adnams is a family firm with a long established reputation for high quality traditional real ales. Linking up with an artist and illustrator with a flair for distinctive imagery and a respect for the traditions of his craft seems like the perfect partnership.

Tuesday 9 October 2007

Reklame und Heimatbild




This book, published in 1931, is the German version of The Face of the Land, published in England in 1930 with an introduction by Clough Williams-Ellis. The Visual Telling of Stories displays generous extracts of the latter from the chapters on “The Petrol Station” and “The Roadside”. Both books are a polemic aimed at curbing the intrusion of advertising in the landscape in town and country alike. The text and most of the photographs in the book are the work of Theda Behme (1877-1961). Concern about the growing power of outdoor advertising crossed national boundaries and these books illustrate some gross and excessive examples. Those of us who are fascinated by outdoor advertising must face the dilemma that whilst some of the cruder and rudimentary examples are undoubtedly disfiguring the landscape there are many other examples which have a sense of vigour and vitality about them that is hard to resist. We also must be aware that with the passage of time, a cloud of nostalgia can settle over vintage publicity material and diminish the power to offend. The same eyes may not look so kindly on contemporary manifestations.




The idea that somewhere in the not too distant past there existed a rural arcadia, pure and uncontaminated by the modern world is very persistent and every successive generation falls victim to it. Some of that thinking can be detected in “The Face of the Land”. It is certainly true that there have been some infamous instances where the scale and insensitivity of outdoor advertising has been monumentally offensive but there is a body of opinion which resents the intrusion of even the most modest commercial imagery for both aesthetic and ideological reasons. There is a counter-argument that whilst conceding that countryside views with landscape value are never going to be enhanced by advertising display, in the undistinguished urban fringe or the cluttered commercial district, advertising imagery simply becomes part and parcel of the scene.




Theda Behme’s photographs reflect a world of muscular commercial activity in which entire gable ends are covered in vast images and letterforms designed to command the attention of a mobile urban population. The overall effect has an American flavour about it in terms of scale and profusion. An impression of a culture of energetic branding and marketing is created. There were many outstanding poster artists at work in Germany at this time, including Ludwig Hohlwein, Lucian Bernhard, Julius Klinger, Jupp Wiertz and Joseph Binder and the Germanic tradition was noted for its boldness and innovation. The urban landscape seen in these photos is the one that inspired painters of Die Neue Sacklichkeit, most notably Karl Hubbuch and Carl Grossberg. Both artists were especially fascinated by the visual impact of commercial imagery on the street scene and faithfully recorded it in their work.



Monday 1 October 2007

Arcimboldo



About two weeks ago I visited the Musée du Luxembourg to feast on fruit and flowers, reptiles and fish, trees and vegetables, rodents and amphibians, all pressed into service as substitutes for human features by one of art history’s great anomalies, Arcimboldo. As an adolescent with a passion for the most exhibitionist varieties of Surrealism, the existence of Arcimboldo’s paintings was evidence that Dali’s visual trickery had a historic pedigree. The passion for Surrealism faded (although it never quite went away) and the work of Arcimboldo made little further impression despite its Taschen led ubiquity. The single fact I did know about Arcimboldo was that I had never actually seen one at first hand.

That is no longer true since there were three large rooms lined with his paintings in this exhibition providing a rare opportunity to get acquainted with these much reproduced but physically elusive images. The organisers had included a good selection of contextual material, sketchbooks, ceramics and 3D figures which were largely ignored by visitors who swarmed around the paintings with scarcely a glance at such enticing exhibits as the glazed dish decorated with an image of a human profile entirely constructed from knobs and testicles. Some of the drawing had an unexpected delicacy of touch. The conclusion to be drawn from this material which included some very finely modelled and cast, small scale replicas of reptiles and amphibians was that Renaissance patrons had a considerable appetite for the bizarre which was well catered to by artists and craftsmen. Nothing is quite so good as an Arcimboldo for the final embellishment of a Cabinet of Curiosities.

Examining the paintings was no easy matter given the crush of spectators and it’s difficult to explain what could only be experienced by actual observation when the images are so familiar from reproduction. The ancient varnished paint surfaces trap the illusionistic colour and texture under an amber layer. Some disparity in quality can be detected. Some illusions carry more conviction than others. Some are calculated to give pleasure and others are meant to shock and repel. The portraits of the seasons are ingratiating but the figure of a reader constructed from books and folios has something to say about the loss of vitality that goes with an excessive adoration of books. The eels and toads and the rats and mice can be distinctly unsettling; the fishy head has a quality of deep chill and a generous coating of mucous like substance that enhances its repellence. Strangest of all was an image I hadn’t seen before of a young and well-dressed child whose regular and almost perfect features were graced by a covering of fine fur. This painting possesses a malevolence and venom which alone makes it worth the price of admission.