Graphic Journey Blog

Any excuse

My little weakness for Miss Seberg...

Woodsman

A couple of years back I featured the work of my brother Frank….

I paid him a visit recently and, as always, was taken aback by the sheer volume of work he creates. Here…

there…

and everywhere…

He is very much an ‘outsider artist’ having never received any formal art training, but he has always had an insatiable appetite for creating. 

Over the past four decades he has made sculptures from wood. Wood that he gathers from highways and byways on his journeys, but mostly these days from the twelve acres of land that he lives on in deepest Wales where he has been for the past 15 years. 

His work is eccentric, fun, provocative and often beautiful to look at and to the touch. He has never exhibited or sold much. The whole process of negotiating a sale fills him with horror. He continues making because he has a need and passion to do it along with music – he plays sax, clarinet, flute, keyboard and took up cello  a decade ago. His house is busting with hundreds of carvings, papier-mâché pots and a plethora of other creative activities that he indulges in. Outside he has  planted hundreds of trees, all now maturing, and a series of delightful gardens in which his many sculptures feature. Here is a little visual gallery… 

Creative hero

BBC/Brilliantly Beautiful Broadcasting Corporation

BBC4 Extra (formally known as BBC Radio 7 – although I can’t hear much difference on listening to it since the name change) is currently re running The Complete Smiley. Wonderful dramatisations from the John le Carre novels. I listened to A Murder of Quality. It is without doubt one of the finest adaptations for radio. Headed by Simon Russell Beale as the eponymous George Smiley…

in a beautifully judged understated and intimate performance – one that equals the original Alec Guinness TV rendition. Beale leads a stellar ensemble of outstanding actors in this dense narrative that keeps you on your mettle from beginning to end. It is peppered with the distinctive sound of 1950/60s telephone rings… 

along with claustrophobic rain swept days to perfectly transport you into the heart of the plot. It is sublime listening for bedtime, especially if, like me, you wake up in the early hours. It is a pleasure to pay my license fee for this kind of quality. But if you only possess a radio and no TV, there is no need to pay. How good it that? Until you sample the quality (or rather lack of it) of overseas broadcasting you will have no idea of just how fine the BBC is. Long may it remain a truly public service. To hear the play and other in the series click here.

 

Ken Sequin – Glittering talent

Last year I posted a piece about one of my favourite haunts – the second hand bookshop. I showed this paperback cover from the mid 1960s, unearthed from the cavernous bowels of Skoob Books…

I mentioned that it had been part of a very nice Corgi Books series illustrated by Ken Sequin. I asked if anyone had other examples from the set. Who should contact me but Ken Sequin himself and he sent me these missing covers from that set which all feature his lovely work…

John Piper - Gorgi Book’s then Art Director - designed them. I think the typeface used is Standard Black (Akzidenz Black). But Ken believes it was a bastardised version of Helvetica. Whatever it is, it works and I love them. They still look so fresh.

A little bit about Ken Sequin. At 15 he attended Wimbledon Art School where he absorbed himself in graphics, stain glass and painting. Just three years later in 1960 he was exhibiting his work at The Young Contemporaries show. That led him on the Royal College of Art where he studied graphic design and illustration under the influential typographer Anthony Froshaug (1920 –1984). 

These were the nursery slope years of what were to become the heady days of the 60s when all things creative were beginning to converge and the RCA was the perfect melting pot.Sequin found himself exposed to many creative talents and disciplines including Marie Rambert of Ballet Rampart and the poet, Gregory Corso who read some of his work at the RCA. His own illustrative leaning was focused across the pond and particular the extraordinary collective Push Pin Studios whose output was astonishing and varied. Among them Milton Glaser, Paul Davis and Seymour Chwast. Through their influence and no doubt others like Bob Gill, Paul Hogarth, Jack Larkin, Roger Law, Julian Allen and David Hockney who were all employing a conscious naivety in their work with very sophisticated results, Ken Sequin carved out his own particular take on this form of illustration…

Sequin fuelled himself on jazz, – for which he produced posters for the RCA –

European literature from Camus to Calvino, concrete poetry and the constructions of Ian Hamilton Finlay. In 1963 he was awarded an RCA scholarship and went to Poland to research polish poster art and cinema. Throughout this he was illustrating with very little input from RCA tutors who seemed few and far between. Examples of Sequin’s work appeared in the 1966 D&AD annual …

Above two spreads from the RCA magazine ARK winter 1964

After graduating he freelanced for publishers, weekend colour supplements...

and he had a brief spell in television design, working on ABC TV’s arts programme, New Tempo produced by Mike Hodges (he of Get Carter fame).  Sequin eventually left London and pursued full time teaching, where he spent a considerable amount of his life. He returned to London in the early 90s and now concentrates on painting, and no doubt reflects on his interesting life. Here is some of his recent work…

Doing a little survey of illustration recently, I am very heartened to see resurgence in Britain and the best place to see it happening is in your local bookshop. As in the past, it is the humble book cover that is trail blazing a new dawn in innovation. The magazines and the advertising agencies mop up the talent many months later.

Lastly if anyone out there knows what became of John Piper, Gorgi Books Art Director in the 60’s, I’d love to hear from you.

The Brutality of brutalism

As humble graphic designers our work is instantly disposable. Not so with architects. Their work is around for us all to love or hate for a very long time indeed.
 
In recent years many so call ‘iconic’ structures have appeared up and down our country and around the world. From where I live in Clerkenwell I can witness the daily spectacle of the Shard slowly making its way up to the heavens in what will become London’s biggest phallus yet…

The epic 1,017ft Shard by Renzo Piano

I was very touched to hear David Chipperfeild’s view on architecture at the opening of his new and beautiful Turner Contemporary Gallery in Margate.  The whole notion of showpiece architecture appals him. His buildings are relatively quiet, modest affairs almost vernacular in some cases…

David Chipperfield's Turner Contemporary Gallery at Margate

his Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach, Germany

and the humble River and rowing museum at Henley -on- Thames

This got me thinking about the way in which architectural whims are imposed on us mere mortals through the persuasion of ‘signature’ architects and their clients who both seem to want to immortalise their egos through epic structural legacies.
 
We’ve all seen these things dotted around the country especially on beaches…

Above the thirty foot sound mirror
at Denge Marsh. Photographed by Julian Hills

Made mostly from reinforced concrete, built to survive bomb blasts, they were the bunkers, gun emplacements, observation points and radar reflectors of W11 and are still dotted around our coastline.
 
It was this brutal aesthetic that was to become a movement in its own right. ‘Brutalism’ was taken up by a group of architects in the 1960s and 70s who literally fell in love with exposed reinforced concrete and the rest is history in the ever present weather stained existence in all our major cities.
 
Here are some notable examples…

The Hayward Gallery designed by Norman Engleback, assisted by Ron Herron and Warren Chalk

The National Theatre designed by Denys Lasdun completed in 1976

Its dark underbelly

and masculine dominance

The Barbican in London designed by Chamberlin,Powell and Bon in the 70s

IBM South Bank HQ designed by Denys Lasdun

University of Leeds

 Trellick Tower designed by Ernő Goldfinger. Completed in 1972 and much lauded by architects who I would think don't live there.
The Brunswick Centre design by Patrick Hodgkinson, completed in 1972

Chichester Festival Theatre designed by Philip Powell and opened in 1962

Trinity Carpark in Gateshead immortalized in the film 'Get Carter' now reduced to this...

I have long tried to appreciate these buildings but have come firmly to the belief that they have an anti people harshness. This inhumanity manifests itself in the overwhelming and intimidating size along with the unforgiving texture of exposed concrete.

The raw material

The worse example I could find in London is this building…

Samson House Southwark Street. Designed by Fitzroy Robinson & Partners in 1976

Its similarity to this is uncanny…

I find both structures incredible frightening. And having to endure these  ‘in your face’ monsters day after day is an affront. But as with all things architectural one man’s meat …
 
A pity that there are not more David Chipperfield's whose work avoids the ‘mines bigger than yours’ syndrome...

His work has grace and an understated dignity. If only architects could leave their egos in a box and think more about the effect that their work has on the people that they have to share the planet with, our environment would be much better for it.

I think I should own up to the fact that back in 1986, when my then design consultancy, Carroll, Dempsey & Thirkell had bought and old warehouse, we chose a young up and coming architect to design our new home in Bloomsbury...

 

And the architect we chose - why, David Chipperfield of course.