Fifty One Years of Illustration Professor Lawrence Zeegen
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Fifty One Years of Illustration
Fifty One Years of Illustration Professor Lawrence Zeegen University of the Arts London Professorial Platform 2015
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Fifty One Years of Illustration, Lawrence Zeegen
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Teenage Dirtbag
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Art School
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Hate and War
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Theft
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Flotsam and Jetsam
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Untrained Designers
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Tutors and Students
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Every Other Illustrator
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Things I’ve Learnt
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Childhood
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I’m the eldest of two siblings, or six including half-siblings; my sister Astrid, named by my parents Ann and Les after Astrid Kirchherr, photographer and girlfriend of Stuart Sutcliffe the fifth Beatle and a friend of a new friend of mine, Klaus Voormann, the artist responsible for the Beatles’ Revolver album sleeve released the year after my birth. But more of Klaus later. I’m 51 and this is the tale of 51 years of illustration. Admittedly mine are entirely personal to me, but I believe we all have our own 51 years of illustration, or at least you do if you’re my age, if you’re younger you have less and if you’re older you’ll have more. But you get the general idea. Illustration, I believe, touches everyone’s lives right from the very start and pretty darn constantly throughout. If you don’t believe me, it’s simply because you’ve yet to recognise the power of the illustrated image and its impact on your life.
Introduction
University of the Arts London Professorial Platform 2015
I was born 51 years ago in 1964 – the year the Beatles landed for the first time in the USA, the year Cassius Clay (soon to become Muhammed Ali) defeated Sonny Liston to win his first world heavyweight championship title, the year Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor married for the first time and the year Andy Warhol painted his first electric chair. I’m the last of the Baby Boomers (1946-1964), the first of the Generation Xers (1961-1981), a product of my time.
This publication, a collection of my memories, stories and views of 51 years of illustration, has been written and designed to accompany Fifty One Years of Illustration, my University of the Arts London Professorial Platform Lecture at the House of Illustration in London on Monday 28 September 2015. If you’re reading this independently of the lecture you’re getting an edited overview but I hope it is enough to help guide you in seeing just how and where illustration has touched your own life. In the way it has mine for 51 years. Professor Lawrence Zeegen
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I’m fairly sure that for most of us our very first introduction to art comes when we are children, when we view the illustrations in the books read to us by our parents. I can certainly recall looking at books, posters, record sleeves, T-shirt designs and breakfast cereal packaging way before I can recall seeing ‘art’ or my first visit to an art gallery. Illustration is the ‘people’s art’. It is honest and available, open and approachable. Illustration, a direct descendant of the ancient cave paintings of 30,000-40,000 years ago, is one of the most direct forms of visual communication; it elucidates, informs and entertains. For children it can be a window into so many new and varied worlds. Imagined or real, fact or fiction, these are worlds to be discovered and illustration provides the entry point. My own immersion into illustration most definitely came about through being introduced to children’s books at a very young age. I was read to by my mother every day. She encouraged and taught me to read by myself too and I can recall the joy in discovering how illustrated images fed my imagination.
Fifty One Years of Illustration
Fifty One Years of Illustration, Lawrence Zeegen
Childhood
Researching Ladybird by Design, the book I’ve written and published this year to celebrate 100 years of Ladybird’s history and the exhibition of the same name co-curated with Jane Won of the De Le Warr Pavilion in Bexhill, allowed me the opportunity to revisit my childhood. Reconnecting with Ladybird and recollecting Ladybird books - and at last count around 450 books were hunted down across second-hand book stores, junk shops and charity shops, car boot sales and flea markets - gave me a special opportunity to reconnect with my childhood.
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I grew up on Ladybird; like so many of my generation I was offered a utopian vision of an innocent world where learning to read was fun, nursery rhymes were enchanting, nature was abundant, history was heroic, science was enthralling and modern life was seemingly bathed in the bright sunshine of an eternal summer.
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As radically different as this was to my own life, idyllic too but with less jolly hockey sticks and lashings of ginger beer, I could still identify with Peter and Jane. Sure, Peter appeared more tidy and well-turned out (shoes always polished and hair neatly cut) than my mates and I ever looked – think grown-out Beatles mop-tops and worn-out plimsolls – but Peter’s lust for life and sense of fair play resonated throughout the alleyways and playgrounds of early seventies new town Basingstoke.
Childhood
Fifty One Years of Illustration
Ladybird’s illustrations depicted a life, through Peter and Jane of the Key Words Reading Scheme first launched 51 years ago in 1964 and the year of my birth, a little unlike the one I knew growing up on a council estate in Basingstoke. Peter and Jane had an idyllic childhood with exciting adventures to be had and fabulous mysteries to be solved.
I blame the illustrations. Ladybird’s illustrators created a perfectly believable world, a world where the realities of modern life – power blackouts, strikes and 3-day weeks were suspended, a world where childhood was embraced and enjoyed, free from the impending demands of adulthood.
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I was sixteen in May 1980 when The Face magazine launched. Sally Irvine, a fellow pupil and one-time girlfriend, brought a copy of the first issue into school and I knew from that moment on what I wanted to be – cool. I may well have failed in that pursuit, but that wasn’t the fault of Nick Logan and his band of writers, designers, photographers and illustrators. The Face charted the elite of London’s uber-cool and I soon played catch up far away from the sidelines of Soho, in Basingstoke studying an Art and Design Foundation course at the local tech.
Fifty One Years of Illustration
University of the Arts London Professorial Platform 2015
Teenage Dirtbag
The Face and ID, both launched in 1980, the year I left school, captured the raw energy of the post-punk streets of London. The decade’s hipsters took the art of looking, acting and being cool to new levels; they rejoiced to the tunes of Grandmaster Flash, the Stray Cats, Heaven 17 and the Specials, were garbed by Hyper Hyper, Kensington Market and Robot and worshipped at the altar of Blitz, Billies and Camden Palace. The Face and ID were omnipresent, capturing every moment, every mood, from the backcombed hairstyles defying gravity to the studded leather jackets defining gravitas.
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There were three long years between the launch of The Face and my own arrival in London. I would spend these years travelling to the capital to see bands; the Jam until their break-up in 1982 and The Clash until their demise in 1983; to buy clothes from the Great Gear Market, World’s End and Johnsons and to buy records from Camden Market. I was born a touch too late for Punk Rock, being thirteen in 1977, but right on time to join a generation reared on the ‘Style Bible’ that was The Face – guided by all things fresh and hip in fashion, music and film and taught vital early lessons in contemporary illustration. Here, for me, was a discipline that demonstrated itself to be irreverent and quirky and right on the money with the look, feel and aesthetic. Illustration would engage an audience of trendsetters, movers and shakers in ways just as pivotal as photography in representing the mood and times of the 1980s.
Teenage Dirtbag
Fifty One Years of Illustration
Once again, for me, it was illustration that played a key part in capturing this new mood. The Face’s ‘issue numero uno’ featured on its first page an illustration of a dancing zoot-suited dude by Ian Wright, later to become a good friend as well as a represented artist at Heart and ZeegenRush, two illustration agencies I was instrumental in setting up during the 1990s, and later a teaching colleague at Camberwell College of Arts and at University of Brighton. The Face, with Neville Brody as Art Director, wasn’t afraid of using illustrated images to define the new cool, and after Ian, a contemporary of Neville’s at the London College of Printing (now London College of Communication), came many others including Peter Kennard, Russell Mills, Barney Bubbles, Kiki Picasso and Serge Clerc.
By 1983 I had arrived in London, just three years out of school but starting life at a new school – art school.
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In 1983 the printmaking studios at Camberwell College of Arts were where it was happening. I was a first year student studying BA (Hons) Graphic Arts, but the coolest kids were the final year guys milling about in black leather motorcycle jackets, smoking roll-ups and Gauloise and drinking strange Mexican beer from the bottle with a piece of lime wedged in the top. A piece of lime – how very decadent. Of course, entering the print studios as a first year student with zero credentials was a test of nerves, an initiation of sorts. To claim a screen, a bed and some time printing took some balls. I looked the part, or so I thought, dressed in suede pointed-toe brothel creepers, black skin tight 501s and an orange World’s End rope print pirate shirt with jet black backcombed hair and Buggles-style glasses; it was the early eighties, after all.
Fifty One Years of Illustration
Fifty One Years of Illustration, Lawrence Zeegen
Art School
Not only did this renegade crew, all smoking, drinking and sneering, signify I was in the right place at the right time, so too did the work coming out of the printmaking department at Camberwell at that time. Three of the best, Adrian, Olly and Andy were hard at work producing DOG magazine, ‘hard, sexy, violent, lonely – the graphic of youth’, full to the brim with edgy visuals and tough statements; they had attitude and weren’t afraid of showing it.
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I got to know everyone at Camberwell. I worked behind the student bar lunchtimes and evenings; I learnt to make cocktails, book DJs and bands, discuss left-wing politics and drink morning, noon and night. Luckily, around year three, I also learnt how to be an illustrator. The greatest lessons came occasionally from one or two key staff, far more frequently from a key person called Dave. A fellow student, an ardent music fan and my next-door neighbor, Dave slept daytimes, and created artworks of extraordinary detail at night. Rarely did Dave attend a studio critique, more often he would set his artworks alight at dawn – I was gifted with the opportunity to attend these regular ceremonies.
Art School
Fifty One Years of Illustration
Andy, brother of Matt Johnson, the main protagonist behind seminal post-punk new wave band The The, was also busy creating artwork for the band’s next album sleeve, while Olly was creating a collage of drawings of Peckham Road as seen from the print studio windows above and Adrian was designing posters for select south-east London gay clubs and parties, his flat mate in a south London tower block being one half of Bronkski Beat. This was a gang worth getting to know.
Few pieces remained of Dave’s fantastic illustration output come the degree show in June 1986. His postcard ‘Fool’, a self-portrait skipping across the Somerset countryside he so missed while an art student deep in south London, is the only example of his work I still have. I have taken great pride in pinning this postcard on the wall of every studio, agency, and office I have occupied since Dave’s suicide a year or so after we graduated.
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I can recall how vital punk’s sloganeering felt to me as a timely reaction against the hippy years of the late sixties and early seventies. The Clash’s ‘Hate and War’, a track on their first album, had shot onto the scene as a perfect antidote to the hippy trippy mantra of ‘Peace and Love’. My teenage, and later art school, years were motivated by music that incited revolution; from dub reggae to ska and from post-punk new wave to underground soul and rare groove, and by fashion that agitated and provoked reactions; from Westwood and Mclaren’s menacing T-shirts to Johnson’s overstated Americana and from Mambo’s skater gear to the Hard Times aesthetic of distressed denim described in detail by Robert Elms in his seminal article for The Face. The images that also inspired me during these formative years could best be described as angry.
Fifty One Years of Illustration
University of the Arts London Professorial Platform 2015
Hate and War
I looked at the work of artists, designers and illustrators that had something to say and weren’t afraid to say it. From Andy Warhol’s death and disaster photographic images of car crashes and electric chairs to Jamie Reid’s graphic images, as vital as the music and the fashion in propelling the Sex Pistols to stardom. My initial influences were hardly subtle – Jean-Michel Basquiet and Keith Haring from New York, later to include Faile, Jeff Koons, Shepard Fairey and Marshall Arisman and from London, Peter Blake, Sue Coe, Barney Bubbles and Ian Pollock.
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But my rebellion of the early-mid eighties wasn’t entirely faux. I did march to oppose racism and the rise of the National Front, protest Tory student grant cuts and rally against the death of the GLC. I believed in the cause and believed in the power of the illustrated image to attract attention and change minds. Many of my first commissions upon graduation were for Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the Refugee Council – I designed countless T-shirts, badges and posters for their causes and truly believed I was making a difference. If my days were filled with revolution, then my nights were filled with revelation as I spent the time sampling the exotic delights of London’s Clubland. From the extravaganza of Philip Salon’s Mud Club and Chris Sullivan’s Wag Club (formally Whiskey-A-Go-Go) in Soho dancing to DJs Jay Strongman and Fat Tony, to the original warehouse clubs of Rotherhithe, Shoreditch, Blackfriars and beyond, at Dirtbox and Norman Jays’ Shake ‘n’ Fingerpop and Nick Trulocke’s Delirium, so that by mid point in the decade I’d dropped Hate and War for a new mantra first proclaimed by Alex McDowell of Rocking Russian on the hippest T-shirts around – Fuck Art Let’s Dance!
Hate and War
Fifty One Years of Illustration
I’d walked the Kings Road dressed in Jamie Reid’s God Save the Queen T-shirt, albeit a few years after the Silver Jubilee, dressed the walls of my first flat in Brixton (moving in a year after the riots against all advice from family and friends) with Rock Against Racism posters and now my daily walk from Brixton to Camberwell along the Front Line gave me the confidence to believe I was well and truly keeping it real. I was young, angry and if asked what I was rebelling against believed I would mutter ‘whadda you got?’ just as Marlon Brando had in The Wild One thirty years earlier in 1953.
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If you look too much towards your inspirations can you be deemed a thief? By 1986 I’d built up a body of work that relied upon my ability to create original graphic drawings, with a clean black line edge, and my trademark use of bold primary colours that translated well into prints and print. The work of my final year show at Camberwell was covered by Elle magazine and Creative Review, I was invited to exhibit at the Royal Festival Hall and Barbican as part of two exhibitions celebrating the best of the year’s graduates, and I sold pieces of work to Deyan Sudjic, then editor of Blueprint and now Director of the Design Museum, and to art directors at Elle, Marie-Claire, Time Out and The Sunday Times. I was in demand. But I was soon to turn away from my own drawings and turn instead towards the drawings of others – often to the drawings of untrained designers and graphic artists; the work of tattoo artists, rubber stamp designers, clip art creators… but more of my appreciation for the untrained artist later.
Fifty One Years of Illustration
Fifty One Years of Illustration, Lawrence Zeegen
Theft
I sourced second-hand black and white illustrated dictionaries from junk shops, books packed with copyright-free clip art from Dover Street Books in Covent Garden, out-of-print catalogues containing line art illustrations from secondhand bookstores and rubber stamp catalogues from trips to Paris and New York. If there was a decent piece of line art in a publication I’d have it – from drawings of cheap shoes advertised in the back of 1950s pulp-fiction magazines to the technical drawings of mechanical equipment in whole-sale catalogues or the medical and scientific illustrations in textbooks of the 1960s; they were all up for grabs.
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A once-forgotten scientific drawing of an atomic or molecular structure brought back into existence for a cover for New Scientist, or a piece of clip art of a power-suited business man given a new life as an extra in a commissioned illustration for The Economist – nothing was out of bounds and anything seemed possible. Surely re-appropriating these forgotten, but now newly found images, was an extension of the punk philosophy of ‘Do-It-Yourself’ – the visual equivalent of the three-chord, three-minute record, here today and gone tomorrow? I’d always appreciated the speed in which illustrations in newspapers in particular, and to a lesser extent those appearing in magazines, had to hit the ground running. They had to attract a viewer instantly, get a message across in moments but be prepared for the inevitability of a short life, ending up as fish and chip paper within 24 hours. To give a second shot at life to a long-dead illustrated image didn’t feel criminal, it felt almost like a calling.
Theft
Fifty One Years of Illustration
I certainly didn’t intend to steal. I saw a role in breathing new life into a piece of line art, often simply ignored or long since forgotten. There was something rather fulfilling about placing an image onto the glass plate of a photocopier, and later a scanner, and enlarging a small anonymous black and white drawing, creator unknown, to start a process of design that would give the image a second stab at stardom.
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There is a saying that if you stand at Piccadilly Circus long enough then all of life will pass by. By the same measure, I believe that if you take desk space in a studio full of illustrators for long enough, as I did for many years as part of Big Orange, then all illustrated matter will pass by too. Illustrated matter washes up in a studio as if flotsam and jetsam on the banks of the Thames; illustrators just can’t help themselves. They collect it, store it, catalogue it, display it, harbour it, protect it and from time-to-time reinvent it. I have collections of Ladybird books, as you might imagine, and collections of The Face magazine, as you’d expect, but I also have large collections of technical instructions for assembling flat-pack furniture, airline safety cards, illustrated cigarette cards and matchboxes, as well as hundreds upon hundreds of Coca Cola bottles, collected from every corner of the planet over a 35 year period. And from time-to-time aspects of my collections, my flotsam and jetsam, make an appearance in an illustration.
Fifty One Years of Illustration
University of the Arts London Professorial Platform 2015
Flotsam and Jetsam
Often these appearances aren’t sought out and certainly aren’t predetermined – it can be a chance encounter that triggers a thought or an idea. The washed-up materials may make it into a picture as a clear element in a collage or they may simply influence the choice of colour or pattern, layout or arrangement in a new illustration.
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Don’t get me wrong, I’m no digital Luddite; I succumbed to the allure of the digital earlier than most and I do feel a great sense of pride that I survived the jump from BC, Before Computers, to AD, After Digital. But for me inspiration comes from pouring over paper and print. Far more preferable than pixels and PDFs, it’s always about the physical over the digital, the tangible over the virtual. You can touch and smell print. When you create an image destined for print, rather than screen, you have sense of adding a tiny jigsaw piece to a great history and tradition.
Flotsam and Jetsam
Fifty One Years of Illustration
Printed matter can lie dormant in a plan-chest drawer undiscovered for years before becoming a critical element in or an influence on a picture. I’m less convinced that a Google search is as enjoyable as a rummage through a personal archive – seeking out that long-lost copy of a magazine you bought as a student simply because the overprinted colours worked in a particular way, or the diagram on a piece of packaging picked up at flea market in Barcelona that had a certain visual aesthetic you’re compelled to revisit as inspiration. To me this feels so much more life-affirming than the click of a mouse or the drag of a cursor.
It is adding to this never-ending treasure trove of printed matter that illustrators exist for – we want to make images that communicate, that elucidate, that entertain and educate but most of all we want to make images that resonate and that may have an after life, that may wash up in the flotsam and jetsam of print collected by others long after we’ve ceased to be around.
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I have had the luxury of having been at art / design school since the age of 18, first studying on the Art and Design Foundation course at Basingstoke Technical College before embarking upon the three year BA (Hons) Graphic Arts course at Camberwell College of Arts, then taking a year out to do a little teaching and plenty of commercial illustration commissions before two years on the MA Illustration programme at the Royal College of Art. This was neatly followed by further teaching on a very ad-hoc basis back at Basingstoke and then at Camberwell; I’ve been immersed in art and design education for most of my life.
Fifty One Years of Illustration
Fifty One Years of Illustration, Lawrence Zeegen
Untrained Designers
Having first run the part-time BA (Hons) Graphic Design course and subsequently the full-time Graphic Design course at Camberwell during the mid-nineties, before leaving for the University of Brighton to head up the BA (Hons) Graphic Design and BA (Hons) Illustration courses for over a decade, I arrived at Kingston University in 2009 for a two year stint as Head of the Design School before being tempted away to join London College of Communication as Dean of the Design School in 2011. I have been, in one-way or another, engaged in art / design education between 1982 and 2015, of course whilst maintaining professional practice as an illustrator and design writer.
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Of course, I can enjoy the aesthetic of a brilliantly designed poster, book jacket, record sleeve or website just as much as the next design academic, but stumbling across that rare object that’s not so much been designed but cobbled together by the non-designer is just as pleasing, if not more so. Whether picking up a greetings card created for a ‘best mate’ complete with vaguely three-dimensional renderings of football players, a pint of Guinness and a dartboard from a street market vendor on a trip to Wales, or receiving a gift of a paper shopping bag from my partner’s trip to South Africa, decorated with reproductions of graphic drawings straight from a township barbershop sign; these are items that can hold so much more beauty than any mass-produced, commercially viable piece of communication design.
Untrained Designers
Fifty One Years of Illustration
Strange then, I guess you’d agree, that despite having been involved in the education of many hundreds of wannabe designers, illustrators, animators, art directors and artists that I hold an odd fascination for the work of those unguided, untaught, untrained by art / design schools. I’m fascinated by the low-fi, the low-tech, the low-down artwork of those unsullied by formal design training – a naïve drawing or painting picked up at a flea market created by an unknown, uncelebrated outsider artist or a hand-crafted street sign warning of a dangerous dog or a hand-rendered poster appealing for safe return of a lost kitten over beautifully designed artworks and artifacts for sure.
Give me a piece of poorly designed packaging, neither updated nor modernised for decades, from a hidden stall tucked away at the Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre over a glitzy all-bells-and-whistles, all-singing-and-dancing website straight outta Shoreditch any day of the week.
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I have probably learnt much more as a tutor than I ever did as a student. I’m a keen advocate for ‘life-long learning’ – you can only learn so much at art / design school before you need to go out into the world and learn about life and its relationship to design and learn of design’s relationship to life. As a student some of my fellow students were the best I could have hoped to study alongside; Jason Ford, Patrick Thomas, Marion Deuchars, Dan Williams and Toby Morison, and as a tutor some of the very best academics have been colleagues; Ian Wright, Paul Burgess, Gary Powell, Margaret Huber, Graham Rawle, Scott King, Dirk Van Dooren, Rebecca Wright, Martin Andersen, Bruce Brown, George Hardie and John Vernon Lord. You’d be a fool not to learn lots from that list.
Fifty One Years of Illustration
University of the Arts London Professorial Platform 2015
Tutors and Students
Setting up Big Orange, a studio of like-minded RCA MA Illustration graduates from the class of ’89, in Hoxton at the fag-end of the eighties taught me more than I could have ever imagined about the complexities of running a studio; promoting one’s work, winning commissions, meeting deadlines, paying the rent and the bills, delaying couriers and waiting for artwork to dry before it could be packaged up and sped off to a client. I learnt so much more too, of course; camaraderie and friendship, self-belief and verve and a faith in the design community to keep reinventing itself, to continually look forward to the next challenge.
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It is impossible not to learn from one’s students too. Sara Fanelli, a student of mine at Camberwell, taught me very early on in my teaching career that a great brief rarely specified the outcome – that a poorly conceived project to design a poster for an exhibition about chairs should simply be about looking at how and why people sit down. A great starting point is all a great student might need. It was Alex Bec and Will Hudson of It’s Nice That, students at Brighton, who taught me the art of thinking big and acting big, although some might say I’d picked this up myself along the way. Alex and Will wanted some big industry names included in their student project of published postcards. They confidently asked and they got; Anthony Burrill, Genevieve Gauckler and Kate Gibb got involved and from that, It’s Nice That was born.
Tutors and Students
Fifty One Years of Illustration
When you teach you learn from other academics and it is vital to keep your eyes, ears and mind open to new possibilities and new ways of doing things. I’d barely written a sentence, save student feedback at assessment points, when my Head of School at Brighton called me into his office for my annual appraisal. ‘You’ve always got opinions, you’re never short of a view or a stance,’ stated Professor John Vernon Lord ‘you should really consider writing some of these down and maybe getting something published.’ Fifteen years on, a hundred or so papers and articles later and just into double-digits of published books and I have John to thank for spotting some kind of talent and teaching me to see it and utilise it.
I’m hugely fortunate to have studied alongside, taught and taught alongside some of the best designers and illustrators this country has produced in the last three decades; I’d have been a fool if a tiny part of that hadn’t rubbed off.
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There must have come a point, and I’m not quite sure when it was, that I started to take an interest in every other illustrator’s work, more so than just my own. I guess this thinking is what leads you to teaching, as it already had done, but it also started me thinking about other ways of working with illustrators. The starting point was certainly the Big Orange studio just off Hoxton Square in 1989 and subsequent moves to two different spaces along Curtain Road – and if you came to the Big Orange party nights you’ll know just how many illustrators, designers, art directors and photographers we could gather in one place at one time. Big Orange was a studio of ten illustrators, a collective of like-minded image-makers with a desire to create and make great work for and with great clients. Each of us had our visual approach, our own projects, our own clients and our own agents. We worked together, ate together, drank together and shared the highlights and lowlights of contemporary illustration together.
Fifty One Years of Illustration
Fifty One Years of Illustration, Lawrence Zeegen
Every Other Illustrator
Alongside Big Orange there was Heart, an illustration agency I was instrumental in setting up, and later ZeegenRush, yet another agency I was involved in. But representing illustrators never felt quite like the right fit for me – I think I was always far too interested in the greater potential for illustration than I was in cold-calling clients, quoting on projects, sending couriers, tapping out invoices. And John Lord’s words were still echoing through my mind.
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It was a meeting with an old friend from the Royal College of Art, Liz Farrelly, who prompted me into approaching a publisher - Liz’s view ‘you’ve written loads of articles and there’s definitely a book in all that content…’ and Liz was right, within a few months I was writing my first book. Actually I was writing my first book multiplied by two – two different books on illustration for two different publishers at the same time. My view was that if you’re going to jump in at the deep end make sure it’s a big jump and make sure it’s a deep pool. So ten years after I started writing on contemporary illustration I have now had ten books published and contributed to a good number of others too. A quick headcount of the illustrators I’ve written about across my own books and the total now stands around 650 from all around the world, with each book available in up to five or six languages.
Every Other Illustrator
Fifty One Years of Illustration
The perfect way to investigate the subject, I was beginning to realise, was to be researching and writing about illustrators and illustration. The starting point was an interview about my work with Computer Arts – I think on meeting the editor I offered my services as a writer on contemporary illustration from the viewpoint of both a practitioner and an educator. They commissioned me, liked the first feature and fairly soon I was writing for the magazine regularly for six to eight issues each year.
Having shared a studio with 10 other illustrators, been involved in representing around 50 others at two different agencies, written about 650 of them in my books and probably another 50 for design magazines and taught upwards of 1000 illustration students over a 25 year period, I can confidently claim to know a thing or two about the state of play of contemporary illustration.
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Around 1981 or 1982, while an Art and Design Foundation student, while walking the galleries of the Tate (it was still the Tate and not Tate Britain or Tate Modern) I was suddenly dumbstruck, just across the gallery, literally yards away from where I was standing was a living and breathing pop artist. Peter Blake, looking just as he did in the books and publications about pop art I’d read, standing looking at a painting – I don’t recall which painting. Quick as a flash I was off in the direction of the shop to purchase the postcard of the classic Peter Blake painting ‘Self-Portrait with Badges’. You will, or should, know the one – he’s dressed head-to-toe in denim, wearing hi-top baseball boots, covered in badges and holding a copy of an Elvis fan club publication. My mission was thwarted however as on return to the gallery with the postcard and a pen poised for Peter to sign his autograph, he’d moved on. More than an hour spent scouring the galleries was to prove useless – Peter Blake had left the building.
Fifty One Years of Illustration
University of the Arts London Professorial Platform 2015
Things I’ve Learnt
Many years later and another meeting with an illustration idol of mine, this time less by chance, and once again I miss an opportunity. I am in New York attending a lecture by Milton Glaser, again you should surely know his work – the classic portrait of Bob Dylan and the I ❤ NY logo. Milton ends the lecture taking questions from the audience and I ask Milton - ‘Milton, I hear that you were never a Bob Dylan fan, but a huge Elvis fan and therefore hid Elvis’ name in Dylan’s hair…’ Milton, cool as a cucumber responded, ‘yeah, I heard that too…’ The next day, at an organised visit to his studio, I mention the question I’d asked from the back of the auditorium the night before, and once again he gave a
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non-committal but slightly agitated answer – I didn’t push it. But my intention to have Milton sign a piece of NYC memorabilia was abandoned, my nerve having left the building.
Before I explain how I resolved this conundrum let me tell of the final outcomes of the meetings with Peter and Milton. Milton sent me a signed reproduction of the Bob Dylan poster, which arrived in time to be included in the exhibition at London College of Communication to accompany my book Fifty Years of Illustration, published in 2014; a happy outcome. And Peter? Well, Peter’s daughter Rose was a student of mine at Kingston University and a few weeks after telling her the tale of chasing her father around the Tate she arrived at my office with a signed copy of the postcard I’d so desired. It had taken thirty years but I finally had it in my hands.
Things I’ve Learnt
Fifty One Years of Illustration
Fast-forward to the present and finally I learn my lesson – don’t let your idols get away. A meeting in Soho with another illustration hero, this time Klaus Voormann – you’ll remember his name, I hope, from the introduction to this publication - and I realise 20 minutes into our meeting that I have left my copy of Revolver on heavy-weight vinyl at home. What else could I ask Klaus to sign I wonder?
With Klaus I wasn’t about to wait another three decades and so marched him to my favourite record shop, a five-minute walk across Soho, in the hope that they had a copy of Revolver. They had more than a copy; the shop had a major display of every classic Beatles album. I took a pristine copy of Revolver from the rack and took it and Klaus to the cash desk where moments after I’d paid and moments before it went into a bag, I had Klaus sign the cover (he subsequently signed copies for the staff behind the desk – they knew the importance of this moment too). So, my lesson finally learnt - seize the moment, don’t delay get on it today! The next 51 years of illustration will likely throw up many more new and exciting opportunities and I’m ready for them…
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Lawrence Zeegen is the Dean of the School of Design at London College of Communication and Professor of Illustration at University of the Arts London. Having studied at Camberwell College of Arts and the Royal College of Art, Lawrence was instrumental in setting up Big Orange, the influential illustration collective and studio, and two illustration agencies Heart and ZeegenRush.
Previous academic posts include Course Director of courses in graphic design and illustration at Camberwell College of Arts and University of Brighton, Head of the Design School at Kingston University before returning to UAL as the Dean of the School of Design at LCC. Lawrence has given lectures and presented papers at institutions internationally. Lawrence has written for numerous publications and is the author of ten published books on contemporary illustration. His most recent books: Fifty Years of Illustration (Laurence King) was published in November 2014 and Ladybird by Design (Penguin) in March 2015. Lawrence co-curated two successful exhibitions based on Fifty Years of Illustration at London College of Communication and Ladybird by Design at the De Le Warr Pavilion and House of Illustration.
Lynne Finn at UAL for coordination of Professorial Platform Lecture Colin McKenzie and Michael Czerwinski at House of Illustration Natalie Brett at LCC for additional financial support Ben Branagan at BB Studio for publication design Rebecca Wright at CSM for publication editing Nina Crane at LCC for publication proofreading Graham Goldwater at LCC for publication photography Lynda Relph-Knight at The Drum for lecture introduction Ann and Matthew Lee for continued support Les Roth for more recent support Rebecca Wright for unshakable support Louie Zeegen, Jake Zeegen and Felix Zeegen All those illustrators featured in Lawrence’s articles, papers, books and lectures
Acknowledgements
Biography
Lawrence’s professional illustration clients include major international newspapers, magazines, book publishers, design and advertising agencies spanning over 1000 commissions across over 25 years. Lawrence worked as a contributing illustrator to The Guardian for over five years.
Lawrence would like to thank the following for their support and assistance:
Lawrence is a Vice President of ico-D, the International Council for Communication Design Associations, a Trustee of D&AD, a Trustee of the De Le Warr Pavilion, Education Advisor to the Design Council’s Sounding Board, a member of the Exhibition Committee at the House of Illustration and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
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University of the Arts London Professorial Platform 2015 ISBN: 978-1-906908-37-9 Art Direction and design: bb-studio.co.uk Design assistance: Rachael Neale Photography by: Graham Goldwater Printed by: Lamport Gilbert Ltd.
Colophon
Š Lawrence Zeegen, 2015
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