36 year old freelance illustrator, Richard Wilkinson, has taken his merry time to find his niche in life. It all started in York, where he studied fine art, “In the 1st week I was told not to use black lines. Don’t go there. They sucked all the joy out of it for me. After that I worked in sound design and then in commercials production until I remembered I wanted to be a commercial artist. That was 3 years ago”. And some where in between, he had a brief career in music, although he is rather modest about it (he was signed to Ninja Tune you know!), “I used to make music but was rubbish at it. I still listen to it though. I’m good at that.”

We pinned down the multi talented maestro to quiz him about his work and got together a selection of his illustrations for you to devour…

Who influences you.

Eyvind Earl, John Currin, Chiho Aoshima, Goya, Ingres, David, Jacques Gautier d’Agoty, Clayton Brothers, Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, Tony Hart.

How did you develop your style/ how would you describe your style

My style developed when I decided to stop trying to develop a style. I’d been trying to get a portfolio together and had a disparate bunch of pictures in lots of different styles – all pretty derivative. So I decided to work as fast as I could on 26 pictures (an alphabet) all at once. A style kind of emerged. It’s still hard for me to see my style though. I suppose its one of those things that only other people can see. The obvious recognisable ingredients are old paper textures and a muted palette. But I suppose my drawing style is recognisable to other people.

Which clients have you worked for

Saatchi & Saatchi, TBWA, Time Magazine, Harper Collins, Penguin Books, Random House, The Telegraph, GQ, We Are Replay.

Any record covers etc…

I did a series of covers for an old friend of mine Lee Jones. The theme was ‘Safari’ so I did a Zebra, a Giraffe, and a half Bongo/half Gerenuk. All had red patterns. It was a very open brief and possibly my favourite job so far. I was also part of a cool group show at Gallery 1988 in LA where we all adapted the cover of one of our favourite records. I chose Thriller and Trout Mask Replica but 2 of the more important artists got there first. In the end I did ‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’.

www.richard-wilkinson.com/

Natural Beauty

Prisoner

Miracle Molar

Safari (record cover)

Brave New World (book cover)

Work It

giraffe

Robot

Intestines

Genesis

Bees

Measles

Eye Laser

Birds and Bees

Exercise

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!

http://www.lewisheriz.com/

If you ask Michael Brimmer what he likes, what inspires him, you’re in for the duration.

“Here goes,” he says, “Femme fatales, acid house hues, images that scream, honesty, sleep deprivation, stale cigarette smoke, vintage glasses – but not sunglasses, interesting mustaches, odd encounters, jazz from bebop to mystic fusion, people who keep things moving, bad make-up, glitter on the right people, booty bounce, street artists who don’t wear Carhart, New York Dolls, Iggy Pop, a slight sense of dazed bewilderment, Japanese films, things I’m not supposed to do, inappropriate humour, nerds with no social skills, warm beer, cold beer, champagne, Parisian weekends… and girls in amazing shoes.”

Phew! With such an array of inspirations, it’s not surprising his work with maverick art collective Goldtooth is so loud and colourful. Born 29 years ago, he grew up in Queensland, Australia, and now punches his weight round London, as much part of the club scene as the art scene.

“Every art show is a great excuse for another party,” he says, “Here’s to Andy Warhol and Capote – socialites, then artists.”

Dog Go

Church Of Goldtruth

Teenage Religious Icons

www.testpresser.com
www.myspace.com/gold-toof

Date of birth. – 23/04/1975

Where did you grow up? – Watford, Herts.

When did you get into art? And why?

My mum encouraged my brother and me to draw and paint to keep us busy while she did the ‘housework’…not sure if that was what she was doing, or not… but we enjoyed it and used to draw when we got up in the mornings from an early age most saturdays this continued through till lunchtime, on the bedroom floor in our pyjamas creating violent scenes from star wars, gladiator battles, scenes with super heroes, weird boxing egg people…

What sort of jobs have you had to support yourself over the years? Any funny stories?

I’ve steered myself away from ‘real work’ as much as possible, I’ve had to, on occasion break that rule, my longest standing job, that I recently quit, was every Wednesday in Hector’s House being quizmaster of my shonky music quiz…that was for about 4 years and I DJ’d in there before the quiz for about 6 years. I’ve been a KP in restaurants, a Litter Picker [collecting dead rats, pigeons and seagulls off the beach] and had a good stint Cheffing in the kitchen at the George, when it was a bit more scummy and crusty [and fun] and for a little while at Ghengis Khan’s Mongolian Barbeque…that was quite funny… Also a fair bit of painting and decorating every now and then.

What do your parents to?

My mum used to be a masseur, but swapped to be a shiatsu practitioner and teacher. My dad was in the London Symphony Orchestra and then at the Colosseum with the English National Opera playing 2nd Viola. We used to have to go to some Saturday morning rehearsals at the Barbican and the Festival Hall which was a bit boring for us at the time, but I’ve appreciated it since. Also free tickets to the Opera was occasionally pretty cool – some fairly spectacular shows went down. I think the singing is sometimes pretty daft, but I like alot of the music and the visual side.

Has music been an inspiration?

Always – I have music on constantly when I’m working, all the time, pretty much…

What do you have coming up in 2008?

This year should be pretty busy, generally working on more of my own bits and pieces trying to finish some projects – a few kids book ideas, a comic that I’d like to turn into an animation and painting and printing as much as possible. I’d like to get back into portraiture as well. I’ve done a few portraits of kids, but they tend to be from photos, and I prefer to work from life. I have a plan for an exhibition, which probably won’t come til next year – utilising Brighton’s wealth of quality characters…

While ‘studying’ Illustration at Brighton’s University of Art I got a bit sidetracked by the world of clubbing. I used to be in bands back in Watford, but nothing really came together after ‘Jamie’s Shame’ split!! Music whilst drawing has always been an imperative, so doing mix tapes was a natural progression.

I got the boys together to create ‘gogglez’ whilst in my 2nd year and I learned to DJ whilst doing it. I lived with Tom from Evil Nine for 3 years, and shared his joy for the Elecno-Techtro beat business, so got a fair few hints and tips whilst watching him getting it together. My original idea for the club-night was that the environment would be blessed with ever changing artwork, but we had so much fun, I slacked off, only replacing backdrops when they got nicked…which was more regularly than I would have liked…

The Brighton queue jumping lifestyle ensued and I slacked off art for too long, to my regret. I wish I could have been a more dedicated square…oh well…if I could remember the fun I had it would have been less regrettable! The millennium came and I started upping the tempo of my design and illustration, doing regular bits for Brighton based companies like phonic-hoop, Tru Thoughts, d0pe clothing, Stompa Phunk and the like. I’ve always been a bit of a dreamer, so planned on doing things my way; which is only really coming together now, having some space in the newly started studio ‘Output’ – based above BDI screen printers, where I was based for the previous year. It’s all about the space and the people involved and now that I’m able to produce paintings, prints and sit at the computer or do a little mix on the decks, I’m in a much better headspace and have started producing work that I’m [nearly] happy with.

No space is big enough though!!

I try to focus strictly on the artwork now rather than spreading myself too thinly Djing and running my partner’s label Aerosolik records, which neither of us have much time for, so we’ve not released much of recent. Percy Filth’s got a new EP coming out soon featuring Foreign Beggars, Maylay Sparks, K-Skills and J-Sands, which is sounding proper and I’d love to be producing music myself but with a daughter of 3 and my step-kids too, there’s not very much time for that….I live in hope!! But the kids are a huge inspiration for me and a great push to continue moving things forward, and proving that although it may be a struggle doing what you love, it can be successful and well worth the while.

“Boxing Bears” [limited edition screen print]

A nice little experimental piece on some off cuts… from the original sketch that I did as a painting. It’s part of a series of various Bear things…don’t know why really. “Panda Cop” and “The Trapeze Twins” included.

I do love a bit of the old half-tone though…got a bit into squirting the hardcore chemicals onto the screen which gave a wicked splashy effect – one that I’ll definitely be doing more of. You need the goggles and masks on really for that though!

I like my prints to be individual rather than all precisely the same. It’s the process of printmaking I enjoy – I don’t do it to try to be exact, unless I’m printing for a client.

” Butterfly + Bear” [limited edition screen print]

This is my first CMYK print, although instead of using Process Cyan, Magenta and Yellow inks, I changed the colours to suit my idea…I like to be experimental, even if I probably shouldn’t be…This was originally a painting I did for my daughter’s room. I had to explain that the Bear is friendly – quite a lot of kids seem to get a bit confused by the cuteness combined with the claws and teeth, but I say: that’s frikken life man, get used to it!!

“El-P live at Digital” [limited edition screen print]

It’s an excellent excuse to get to see some quality bands doing gig posters, but the scene in the UK is not great. It’s definitely on the up but you have to be extremely dedicated – there can be problems with management or merchandise or even the band – if things aren’t sorted properly. This arrangement with Digital (Brighton Club) is a bit cheeky, the club and the band get some, then the artist hopefully sells the rest, without upsetting anyone! El-P’s dude gave me a 7” in return for theirs, which I was chuffed with!

“Ian Brown live at Digital” [limited edition screen print]

I was gonna draw something monkey-ish, but decided to go cut’n’paste mad with this opportunity to produce an Ian Brown print. Don’t know if he likes it or not – I hope so. I’m happy with it. I’m moving away from the gig posters – would love to have the time to do more, but even getting out to the gig is sometimes hard work!!

The BRAG group are all getting a bit more involved with some digital gigs now.

I’ll be doing a Simian Mobile Disco print very soon to force myself to go and see them!!

“MagnetBoy -Flaming Sambucas #47″ [acrylic on canvas]

There’s loads wrong with this painting, but it’s one of my favourites.

Sadly I sold it…but it’s part of a comic book idea, so I’ll probably re-create it at some point, somehow…Drunk-Kid aka Booza and MagnetBoy getting themselves through some close shaves with the power of luck and peculiar hands….

“Large Attack” [limited edition screenprint / painting]

This is a new bigger version of my best selling print so far.

It came from an idea I was working on for a kids book, which I need to finish up…

I started worrying it was all too violent, so I produced some paintings to get it out of my system…which didn’t really work…this comes from the original sketch, rather than the painting. Rough and ready. Painted splashy bits between print layers so each one is individual, and then I can charge more money for them!!

“Oxjam at the Hope” [limited edition screenprint]

What better way to help some charity than with tough-guy robots?

Nice to support the local scene too. Didn’t get to the gig, but I’ve done some work with Largo, designing their logo and wanted to do something totally different for them…even though they still had to buy their own posters!!

“Evel Kneival” [mixed media on canvas / digital design]

Wanted to do a tribute to this dude, as I’d love to be fearless, but tend to feel the fear almost every day! I couldn’t give a what kind of a person he was – he had an action figure made of him that was nearly as bendy as he was…that’s pretty effing cool in my book.

I took my time painting this, then photographed it and finished the design on the computer, so it can become a full colour print soon…

.

“Percy Filth EP” [limited edition screenprint]

I printed these as well as 500 12” sleeves – our Brummie boy Percy has been making wicked beats for quite a while, but sat on things til he found some MCs he really wanted to work with. A great debut EP with lovely white vinyl.

A big job for a little independent hip hop label – especially since myself or BossMan Jez have no time to run the label!! Looking forward to the new EP coming out soon.

As chuffed as I was with this sleeve – I won’t be hand printing the new one!

“Powder Room” [acrylic on canvas]

I still like this painting, which can’t always be said for my work.

It probably helps that I ripped off a classic image and kind of made it my own…

I’d prefer to use life models but it’s a bit simpler to find a tasty image and splash paint all over it.

This was commissioned by Audio and is still there, but will be replaced sometime soonish with some work that’s quite exciting…wink wink!

Adam Oehlers studied visual communication at the University of South Australia. During this course he majored in Illustration and puppetry. These two art forms complemented his love of story telling and in 2001 he formed a puppetry troupe named ‘Mr. Fortune’. After two years of freelance illustration and puppetry shows in Adelaide he moved to England where he lived in Brighton for four years. Continuing with the puppetry, ‘Mr. Fortune’ grew to a seven-person troupe performing their shows in theatres and venues around Brighton. Their life-sized glow in the dark puppets danced their way through bizarre, changing landscapes to a live music soundtrack provided by local artists Lyricool Lips and Bunty.

The weird and wonderful characters that populate the seaside town of Brighton were a constant inspiration for Adam.

“I’m fascinated by the people around me and often find myself making up histories for them, to explain how they have come to be in the situation that they’re in. Its often the tragic stories that I am drawn to, not so much because of the tragedy but because of the little elements of hope that you can find within them.”

After four years in Brighton Adam has taken his work back to Australia to see what kind of strange folk he can find in Melbourne. The inspiration that he has gathered in England is easy to find in his latest series ‘Portraits of the village’ which is on show at the Urban Cow gallery in South Australia and will shortly appear on his website.

Farmer Brian
‘Farmer Brian’ is part of Adams ‘Portraits of the Village’ series. A collection of simple people doing simple things.

A few days earlier
This is a short story about a senile old man who can’t remember what it is that he is looking for but he can remember its urgency. His story is written on the spines of his books and can be followed from the top left corner. The end of the story however gets a little confused as he has removed books from the shelf leaving the ending unclear.

The confused owl
The secret to this creatures problems lies in the berries.

Her Spot in the sun
This is a character from a book that I have been writing with Kate Regester over the past four years. Roxy is one of the main characters that appear in the story.

The Clock Maker
The clock maker in his studio.

Lost at sea

The Nowhere Lighthouse
These two images are the start of a series called ‘the Nowhere Lighthouse’. The story is being written as the illustrations are being done. A fisherman gets caught in a storm and blown out to sea. Has he is losing hope of being rescued he spots a light on the horizon. He rows toward it only to find a mysterious lighthouse in the middle of the sea. It is a story about solitude, madness and the discovery of new things.

Penny farthing
A clever man escaping the big smoke.

www.adamoehlers.com
www.myspace.com/oehlers

Fred Deakin is probably best known as one half of electronic outfit Lemon Jelly with Nick Franglen. He’s also a Creative Director and founder of design company Airside who have worked for everyone from Virgin Trains to the pop star Mika (see www.airside.co.uk). It was not always this way. “I once had a job shovelling bits of metal from under a car-crushing machine in Amsterdam,” admits Fred, “I was bumming around and I got stuck there needing some money.” More relevantly, Deakin’s creative career began when he started running clubs and designing flyers for them in Edinburgh. He then studied at St Martins College and ended up teaching there for a bit. Closing in on the music industry, he worked with Ian Swift at Swifty Typografix, the oufit who were heavily involved in all the Mo’Wax Records art. Around this time Lemon Jelly and Airside kicked into action, the former grabbing a couple of gold albums as well as nominations for a Brit and a Mercury prize along the way. Deakin currently has the triple CD eclectomaniac mix CD ‘The Triptych’ out on Family records (as reviewed in the last issue of Beatmag http://www.beatmag.net/april07/reviews/albums.php )

Lost Horizons

Fred Deakin: “This is the unedited version of the landscape from the album ‘Lost Horizons’, the full monty. It was built in 3D in Maya and the inner shots from the album sleeve use different camera angles. The whole idea is that the countryside in the daytime is an amazing place to be while the city is dull and boring, but then at night it’s the other way round. So it’s about contrast, about the ying and the yang.”

KY

FD: “I like to think what I do is an update on the psychedelic look. Electronic music is about repeating loops, about patterns, waves of stuff increasing in size and this is an attempt to represent those ideas in a graphic way. It’s on the front cover of a book called ‘The Greatest Album Sleeves Of All Time’ which I was very proud of.”

Spacewalk

FD: “Another abstract sleeve evolving ideas a bit further but in a slightly different way. The original pre-XL 10”s are now worth three figures and I’ve had people come up to me and ask me for spare copies. Even the ‘Soft Rock’ 7” in denim with a condom in the pocket is three figures. It’s always nice when your stuff ends up on EBay – if I had more of them I could put them towards a pension plan. This one was after we signed with XL and it carries the ideas forward from the original EPs but on a larger scale. Having no type anywhere on the sleeve is our golden rule. Abstract art is the idea.”

Triptych

FD: “This is the art from the new mix CD. The mix was a labour of love. I’ve made a lot of mixes over the years, both for myself and to promote Lemon Jelly, and I was trying to make the ultimate Fred mix. It took me about a year to try and get the jigsaw to fit together. My whole premise was that it’s all good music and to try to join the dots between the different genres, to be as eclectic as I could without losing the flow. The art tries to moves things forward too, to bring three different cutaways together.”

Mask

FD: “How I first got into graphic design was doing flyers and visuals for club nights I put on. The original one that this is from is called Impotent Fury, also the name of the record label that put out Lemon Jelly originally. The thinking behind it? Basically I wanted to do some masks and this is the best one!”

Jason Manning’s life as a photographer has now returned to the untempered passion for his art that he began with.

“I didn’t have the patience to do painting,” he says, “so when I left Suffolk Art College I borrowed a camera and went round India for six months taking the sort of photographs that I liked.”

This however, was not the beginning of a career as a commercial photographer. Instead, he ended up doing every job under the sun to keep himself afloat, first in his native Suffolk, then in London – tree surgery, meat factory, bean-picking, lettuce-hoeing, catering, Pizza Hut, building sites , dispatch rider. He spent his spare time going to demonstrations and gatherings, shooting “public life in London”. His break came when a friend gave him two rolls of film and asked him to contribute to the first issue of the magazine Sleaze Nation. Jason shot footage of a Renaissance club night and ended up on a retainer for two years. In the meantime he built up a host of magazine contacts during the late ‘90s, working for The Face, Arena, Muzik, DJ and others, as well as showing at a number of exhibitions.

In the end, though, Manning became frustrated with the media’s relationship with photography.

“I don’t like the idea of them [editorial] having a story in mind, “ he explains, “so you go somewhere to get that story without knowing for sure if that story is there. I’d go to places to do a feature about rock’n’roll meltdowns and everyone would be drinking bottled water. That sort of thing. I like the idea of going somewhere, soaking up the material and then deciding how to present it.”

Jason went go back to college – the London College of Communication – to study photography in more depth. “I realised it bears up to more scrutiny than I thought, or that that the institutions I worked for allowed,” he says.

Now, at 35, Jason Manning still works for the likes of Attitude and The Observer but is more selective and devotes much of his time to projects aimed at gallery exhibition.

Folklore Series

“I did a load of portraits of people I know, either late at night or early in the morning. The idea behind the Folklore series is that even though they’re all friends who know each other, we throw ourselves in these kind of states where we wonder whether we do know each other or not. Most knowledge I have of people comes from these sort situations which makes me wonder – do we all know each other that well, then? You end up building up impressions of people in an ambiguous sort of way, not a bad way but definitely folkloric impressions. The other shots are of basic Suffolk scenery, visual metaphors that lay alongside the rest. Moving through combinations of both the viewer builds their own story.”

Folklore 03

Tom At Sarah Wright’s Party

Folklore 02

Cymons Party

Folklore 01

Kale

From The Conversations series

“This was taken on a houseboat in Kingsland Basin, Dalston. It’s pointless taking a picture of someone having a conversation – you can’t hear what they’re saying. The idea is that if you could hear what they’re saying you might not know what they’re talking about in any case. It’s to do with ideas of miscommunication, late night affairs, late night fictions.”

Fruit Machine @ Heaven

“I’ve ended up associated with gay culture because I get sent to these clubs and people like the work and send me back. They’re mad, these places, they party hard, really hard. I think I may get successful pictures because I’m sitting outside that scene. Sometimes something less familiar gets better results.”

Rock’n’Roll Torso

“This is of an unknown band, I don’t know what they were called, some bloke getting ragged performing at a studio in Elephant & Castle. If I’m taking a picture of something musical, whether it’s a club or live music, you have to work alongside the rhythm of the situation. You have to get involved in what you can hear. It ends up pushing you photographically in a certain direction.”

“My first Memory was pencil drawing an outline of a whale next to a miniscule diver,” remembers Dan Lish, “I was obsessed with this image for about a week, then moved onto Dinosaurs. I was about three or four.”

He has moved on since but not so very far. A direct descendant of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the first president of the Royal Academy Of Art, Dan Lish, 35, recently returned to the UK after four years working as a video game concept artist in New York. As graphic artist for Rockstar games he contributed to titles including ‘The Warriors’, ‘Motorcross Mania’, ‘Serious Sam’, ‘Conflict Desert Storm’ and ‘Celebrity Death Match’, and designed all the US characters for certain environments in Sony’s ‘B-Boy’. He has participated in joint shows with graffiti artists and fine artists in Harlem and Brooklyn, as well as a 2000 AD exhibition in London last year and an exhibition entitled ‘The Art of Breakin’: Showcasing Paintings About B-Boy/Hip Hop Culture’.

Lish was born in Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, UK, to an American father and English mother who met while is he was based in Britain with the USAF. He studied graphic design at Great Yarmouth Art College in the late 80’s but he’s “an illustrator by nature so fonts and layouts got a tad boring after a while”. Then he studied at Portsmouth Art College supporting himself with “a run of dodgy jobs such as ‘back of the line’ in a chicken factory, and painting and decorating an old folk’s mental home.” He also studied oil painting at the Art Student League in New York.

The defining event in Dan’s life was moving to the States and getting married. He went to New York with one bag of clothes and a poster tube and “really roughed it for a year – it was hard-going and pretty traumatic”. He maintained a long distance relationship with his girlfriend for a year before they married on Staten Island
“We went through so much out there,” he says, “Experienced some crazy things, from witnessing the Two Towers falling – my Wife worked nine blocks away – to the blackout, to being around shoot-outs in Brooklyn.”

He also observed the most extreme reactions to his paintings when he contributed to the Porn Art exhibition at Greenpoint Brooklyn.
“They where just some pages out of my sketch books, blown up, photocopied and coloured, then mounted onto a six foot piece of MDF wood,” he explains, “It seemed the more people got drunk at the opening, the more they avoided looking at it. You’d think it’d be the other way around, right? My wife made me give the piece away to a friend in the end.”

Now back in England, Dan Lish is based in Brighton, freelancing as a concept designer and illustrator. He’s also involved with the Star Wars Lucas Films Exhibition next year where he’ll be painting and selling alongside original Star Wars creators and concept artists. Primarily, however, he’s working on a graphic novel with business partner Dan Willett and on a vinyl toy of the Jasper Stank character who graces Beatmag’s current cover. “He’s an eight year old pig farmer with teeth the size of your dad’s work-bench,” laughs Dan, “The toy will be about 10 centimetres high and has three variants. Other figures from the Jasper world will be available next year. There’s also a site, www.jasperstank.com for toys, music, animations and games.”

The Great Gray Spider Day

“Children’s books have always been a source of inspiration and a great form of creative escapism, so when I get asked to illustrate a writers idea, I jump at the chance. The image below is a character based on myself as a child – lots of ginger hair and a love of the outdoors. The writer wanted her illustrators to involve themselves as much as possible with the images, so the emotional involvement was quite strong. Ink and wash is my chosen medium for children’s books, sometimes with a touch of digital.”

Early B-BOY Concept Designs

“These where produced with Digitally for Freestyle Games and Sony Interactive for the ‘B-Boy’game for PS2 platform. Whilst in NYC I was still very much involved in the hip hop scene, especially through dance, graffiti art and local DJ battles. Through my experience and accessibility, I was a good man for the job. The characters had to represent there own unique style, with an eye for detail that had to be relevant even in their fashions and the characters’ history. It was a chance for me to bring out my hip hop nerd side and go bonkers. There’s so much underlying politics on the competitive side of hip hop, I had to be careful of my content, questioning myself on every character.”

Monster Hunter Cartigan

“This spread was to garner interest for the graphic novel project myself and my business/creative partner have been producing. He writes the story – it’s amazing, trust me! – and I’m the drawing monkey man. I wanted a very rich illustration style, multi-layered but with muted colours, giving a slightly worn look. Cartigan, the main character and namesake of the publication, will not actually be featured a great amount during the story. Instead the reader follows the tale of the monster hunter’s son and his hopeful attempts to become his father’s salvation.”

Ben Allen, 27, was born and raised in Brighton, the son of an artistically inclined travel agent and equally creative bank project manager from whom he thinks he inherited his talents. However, he describes the defining event of his life as discovering his dad’s Led Zeppelin albums, aged 12. He only studied art to GCSE level and it wasn’t until 2000, after returning from a three month jaunt in Mexico, that he threw himself wholeheartedly into painting. Before that he’d tried everything from bar work to running a skate-shop and even a day on the dustbin lorries (“The Job Centre told me I’d be working with an environmental team”). Nowadays the commissions come thick and fast. “I painted a 40ft stairwell over three floors for Virgin management in their Notting Hill office.” he recalls, “That was full on. I was supposed to just deliver it but ended up installing it with one other guy. It was painted in my studio on eight different panels and then transported up there. The boards had been measured up wrong so it took us ten hours to get it to fit, not to mention having to build the scaffolding tower first.” His last completed commission, creating seven huge paintings on cowhides for the new Hoxton Hotel in London, was apparently even larger.

Apart from numerous exhibitions in London and Brighton galleries such as APART, Art Asylum and Studio 113, Ben’s work has been featured in GQ, Elle Décor and others. Asked about the more extreme reactions to his art Ben describes “one guy who bought a few big pieces told me he uses them in his prayers – I’m not religious but I think that’s pretty damn cool.” He ponders further, “Recently a couple bought a big piece from me, they removed a fireplace from their house to get it to fit – that’s probably the most extreme architectural response I’ve had.” Ben Allen has an exhibition at Microzine in Liverpool from November 30th.

[‘80 GRAFFITI REVIVAL]

“This was one of the first pieces I did using fabric and paint. I found this crazy leopard print material and had it stashed. When I started painting the woman it just clicked, so I cut her template out of the leopard material and surrounded her face, gluing it to the canvas. It created a really ‘80s hip-hop effect and remains one of my favourite pieces.”

[COWGIRL HEAVEN]

“This canvas is 2.5 X 1.8 metres and was great fun to paint. I spent most of it up a precarious ladder in my last studio. The actual cowgirl is larger than the average human which makes her really striking. I placed her over a background with no worldly dimension as she lives in a floating fantasy of beauty and mischievousness”

[END OF AN ERA]

“So you’re getting the idea that I like to paint feminine subject matter! This canvas marked the end of creating so much work influenced by imagery I was creating on the computer. Brain, hand, paint brush to canvas, this is what I’m aiming for more these days.”

[HEADPHONES ONE]

[The first big canvas I painted was this. An image inspired by my love of photographs from the Mark Gabor book of early pin ups and my love of music. This piece was blackboard paint onto an emulsion canvas. It’s such a simple image but really strong, the simplicity makes me revisit it a lot for future inspiration on how to keep it real.”

[JAPAN]

“A few years ago I got into joining lots of different textured materials together. I then stretched them over a canvas frame and really heavily emulsioned it, like 5 times. It takes ages to dry. I leave at least an inch of the materials join protruding from the canvas which creates clearly sectioned panels. It’s awkward to paint over but the textures and separation are really unique.”

[PIN STRIPE POP]

“The girl in this painting has featured in three or four different pieces. She just embodies the retro feel perfectly for me. This was the last canvas I did using her and I’d just started getting into stripes. They can be a pain to paint – straight lines and me a bit of a perfectionist. I think this piece creates a world of layers as if she is travelling through beams of disco light.”

[POP PISTOL]

“This was a natural progression from a basic piece I did just featuring the girl. Painting this kind of detail on canvas can be really time-consuming and I like to experiment and move quite quickly through imagery. So when I started silk-screening, which allows for the detail to be created much less painlessly and much more accurately, she came to life.”

[RODEO RAINBOWS]

“I really like the playfulness of this piece. It incorporates my interest in multi-layering images, allowing the backgrounds to become the insides of the foreground details. Does that make sense?”

[TOKYO IN BLOOM]

“This was a piece I created last year when I was imagining going to Tokyo. I haven’t been yet but this is my visual fantasy of what it is like there when everything is springing to life. I think it also captures a bit of a digital feel representing their obsession with technology. The contrast in Japanese culture of nature and machine is like nowhere else on earth. I love Japanese animation and comic books also. If I had money to burn I would probably have loads of the collectable figures and robots too.”

Born Keith Hopewell and raised in York, UK, Part 2 was one of his home city’s original hardcore graffiti crew. Initially as much interested in the danger and illegality of graf’ culture, he sooned earned his stripes with a unique figurative style that drew attention and eventually saw him exhibiting beside Futura 2000 and Goldie. In recent years his attention has been more focused on music production for Part 2’s studio work is at the leading edge of UK hip hop (Roots Manuva, Ty, etc). His own group New Flesh are one of the funkiest, most innovative acts around as their new album ‘Universally Dirty’ demonstrates beyond doubt. On the visual side of things, Part 2 has his SerialType show from the 12th to the 22nd September at the This Way Up Gallery at the Dragon Bar in London’s Leonard Street.

1.”Part2ism Vs London Underground 1.01 Jubilee Line

“I wanted to do something utilising the London underground and thought about what would be predictable. For instance, installing this on the outside panel of a tube train would look too similar to how graffiti on trains already looks, so I remembered when I put a little part2ism up on the inside window of a tube & was taking a photo, a train on the other line went past. I accidentally caught the movement behind it & then I thought about the glass safety feature on the Jubilee line. I had a couple of associates with me that day and we had the big ‘Hijack’ install with us all taped together in bin liners. We headed down the escalator down towards the trains and found maybe six or more CCTV cameras, so we unpacked quickly and attached lots of pieces of doubled over gaffer tape on the backs of each letter. Sometimes I build the letters in sets of two or three to enable the piece to be placed quicker and this was in three bits, we waited until the display board indicated that the train was coming in 1 minute & stuck it up on the glass safety panel. We took as many pictures possible while the train whizzed in and then out again but no security came so we waited for the next one, then the next one and half an hour later we took it down an left with heaps of footage.”

2. ‘IGod @ Marble Arch’

“I was playing around one day in photoshop, looking at how some religious images looked when they were pixelated. I wanted to see what the Christ image looked like as a silhouette and then everything just clicked. I just couldn’t get away from the i-Pod ad images with the silhouettes; there I had two very strong iconic images from past and present. A big part of what I do with Part2ism is to try and put new spins on branding and the impact branding has on society in general. It’s by no means a dis to Apple or Christianity in any way. I think the art of branding lies in finding out peoples needs and providing a service to cater for those needs so the worst part of branding lies in how people latch on to things. I think there are a lot of good brands that are really creative, that allow people to hijack the brand and drive its evolution. What I really tried to do with the i-God piece is to trigger reaction by juxtaposing two forms of religion adapted to my futurist impression of them. I don’t try to push the connotations too hard with this piece of work, I just think that some unknown force directed that lady in the picture to this venue and knew exactly what’s going on and we just got away with this one.”

4. ‘Supermarket Trolleys’

“This was another play on modern branding and also the hardest to do. Due to the security at those places, if you want to photograph this concept you have to move the trolleys to a clear bit of car park or you get the big iron railings they have to keep them all in line, easier said than done. As soon as you start collecting them together the security are on you. I think shopping trolleys have a very modern/urban image with slight punk overtones, a great vehicle to put in a different context. I had this crazy fantasy that they represented a subway train with all the carriages and wheels in some kinda abstract way.
To a lot of people barcodes represent the future and everything has serial numbers or some kind of numbers anyway. The word ‘pending’ I got from MySpace.com where they have the friend requests bit and just thought it went with the unknown elements of today, like ‘what next’. So I was just playing with the modern environment and subway graffiti to see where I can push the envelope. I remember showing this to a friend and he said, ‘I wouldn’t mind seeing this on my way to Tesco’s to buy a pack of cigs’.”

3. Brandalism

“People seem to like this one; it’s a word I don’t use any more to tell the truth. I’ve been coming across it for a few years now in advertising and marketing books and it seems to be used pretty commonly to describe the overkill of brands and advertisement. I thought I’d hijack it and use it to define my new work, firstly branding heavily influences my work and secondly my work is eco-friendly and since it’s disposable, causing no damage, it couldn’t be classed as vandalism. I loved the way that the word took vandalism to another level – nice bit of wordplay. This piece was aimed to seed my new disposable concept so I thought it’s got to be readable and go somewhere really prominent to gain the best impact. It was actually a pain in the arse doing this cos it was so windy, we couldn’t get the letters to stick and we had to wait half an hour for police boats to leave the area before we could do anything. It took about an hour to install this and normally it should have been up in five or ten minutes. The reason I don’t use the word now is, a friend of mine was going on all the time about patenting the word so I said OK, I’m not really into this intellectual property shit but I’ll google it anyway and see if anybody already has it. Next thing I know Banksy came up on the search and had been using it for a while, I couldn’t understand why nobody had told me, lol. He had been using it to condemn the bombardment of advertising and I was using it in a different context but nonetheless I decided to drop it. Funny enough the word has stuck with me and nobody brings up anyone else using it but I’m happy with Disposable Graffiti & Part2ism.”

5. ‘Target, Joyriding, Northern Line’

“This was a play on the paranoia left after last years terrorist attacks on the London Underground when they shot the Brazilian guy for running. Originally I was gonna do some text saying, ‘Walk, Don’t Run’ with guns running through the letters but it wouldn’t have fitted in there so I settled for the gas masked figure. Its just so unsettling right now that everybody’s got a war to fight. I was talking to a photographer the other day in Newcastle who is always involved in some kind of protest and she was saying she thinks America being one of the newest continents is going through it’s toddler tantrum phase, stamping its feet to get its own way. How true is that? We’ve gotta stop messing up other peoples land and causing all this bloodshed. We put Target up there and I remember a family of Asian men (nothing to do with the dazed man in the photo) got on the train and just sat looking at Target horrified and then got off at the next stop. I felt really bad about that, one of my crew said it’s only cardboard but maybe Target was a bit strong.”

Part 2 will be showing brand new work at The Dragon Bar soon…

Part 2, SerialType show
12 September – 22 September
@ This Way Up Gallery
Dragon Bar, 5 Leonard Street,
London EC2
Nearest tube Old Street

Launch night on Tuesday 12th September 7.00pm – 10.00pm