Gallery – Lewis Heriz
Lewis Heriz studied faces at Grundisburgh Primary, and later at Farlingaye High School in Woodbridge, Suffolk, and employed this study in the low art of caricature during lessons. This got him into trouble on at least one occasion but the look of brief mortification on the face of Mrs Wright at his comparatively flattering portrayal of her became the kernel of an addiction to the capturing of human likeness with pen on paper. Despite this compulsion, he went on to study English in Nottingham, promptly catapulting him into the catering industry. Three years gorging on words, and another three on pizzas, led him to burn it all off with a brief spell as a promoter and DJ, bringing sporadic nights of 60s funk and afro rhythms with his fellow waiter/raw funk enthusiast Hexford; an enterprise they called The Mighty Funk Collective. The posters Heriz designed for these events brought him back to pen and ink, and he now lives and works as an illustrator and designer in London.
Antibalas and The Poets of Rhythm poster
I’ve drawn since I can remember, but I cut my teeth in design as a promoter in Nottingham a few years ago. After doing posters for friends, I began doing my own for the raw funk nights I promoted under the ‘Mighty Funk Collective’ moniker. This poster was the first design that really put me through the paces – doing it taught me a lot about the process of marrying illustration with typography, and was the first time I felt the end result was a faithful representation of the image I’d had in my head when I started. I fell in love with the process of making artwork while listening to the music it was promoting (especially if I enjoyed the music…), and seeing the music have a direct effect on the design.
The Apples – Buzzin About
My work for The Apples started when we booked them on their first trip to the UK. They’re brilliant live – the best thing about them is their complete lack of pretension and their commitment to creating a party atmosphere. When they asked me to do this album, it became clear from the first stage that they weren’t interested in any design that might project an impression of preciousness, despite the fact that their music is deceptively sophisticated. After they’d asked for something bold, simple and childlike, I soon found myself sitting like a grotesquely elongated six year old at the dining table cutting out bits of coloured paper and laughing with carefree abandon. This was also my first LP design, and getting the vinyl copy was a proper *insert a synonym for ‘buzz’ here*
The Splendour – Best Way to Make Money and accompanying singles
This series came from a pitch I made to the band, which became the first single artwork for ‘Audio’. I began as an excuse to make a visual pun on the eardrum, but the cross between medical illustrations and comics artwork became an interesting restriction when developing the concepts for the second single and the album. I would never have thought that doing artwork for a band would see us create back-stories and character profiles to inform the design. I enjoyed doing that.
Sofrito posters
For the Antibalas & Poets of Rhythm gig we got Hugo Mendez – who runs Sofrito Tropical Sessions – up to DJ, and after seeing the poster for the event he asked me to get on board to design their promotional stuff. These posters often reference design and art from the Tropics in the ’60s and ’70s. I’m fascinated with posters’ necessarily in-built visual rhetoric, and I find that self-reflexivity can be a really powerful way of instantly communicating the nature of an event, especially if the music is largely of a different time or place. Although some look like fake originals, there’s no point in them just looking like past events as that completely defeats the object, so I always try to make sure that they have something of the modern about them.
Transport drawings
I love drawing faces more than anything and do it almost constantly, but most of the time it’s all made up. As soon as I moved to London I reveled in the staggering array of faces there were to capture, and soon found myself studying those around me on public transport. It takes a level of paparazzo-gall to do this, and with the transient nature of a train’s residents it’s great training; invariably I must locate and capture a likeness in less than five minutes. It also creates some interesting situations, including an on-the-fly model sitting that saw me attempt to do someone’s portrait in the time it took to get from Maryland to Forest Gate (2 minutes, I’ll save you looking it up). It also serves as a great mnemonic, as sometimes it feels like the hours lost on transport create huge vacuums of memory, when some of the events on these journeys are worth remembering. This might be the sort of thing that an illustrator ought to keep well and truly within their personal sketchpad, but sod it, I find it endlessly fascinating!
Thank you! That was really helpful, I just saved your website url.
Fabulous work. What a beautiful palette and some really lovely images. Real “instant classic” work.