First Impressions
For an aspiring young artist, London meant independence. Even if the surroundings and my student digs were a bit bleak, my student life in London was fun, and I could always go home to my parents at weekends and in the holidays. I enjoyed walking or taking the bus to my Battersea pad despite the dreary post-war streets around it, and in 1951 the Festival of Britain’s modern design and summery optimism was exciting. I was sent on exploratory architectural trips with fellow RCA students to look at Wren’s St Paul’s and Greenwich Hospital, and to get to know London’s art galleries better: I saw my first Henry Moore work, a trio of standing women, at an open air sculpture exhibition in Battersea Park, went to the Tate (now Tate Britain) to see Mexican sculpture and American art, and enjoyed the view of what then were still industrial buildings across the Thames.
These early years taught me how to choose a possible subject and then decide on the most interesting point of view, both of which can take a while but waste less time than drawing the wrong thing. Avoiding the most obvious and therefore the most hackneyed subjects sounds sensible, even when they were what first caught your eye, but first impressions matter too and can be the truest and most vivid.
John Minton, who taught in the RCA painting school, told us to get out of the college and draw more in the real world outside. It was good advice. One summer evening I saw a gasometer not far from the end of Cheyne Walk and drew it straight off with a fountain pen on tinted paper, painting the clouds afterwards with poster paint or gouache – something I wouldn’t do now.
Away from the river, the semi-industrial Battersea of the early fifties was gloomier: thick smog in the winter; left-over bomb sites; the rickety-looking but indestructible railway bridges. These student drawings were made with a fountain pen, with neither preliminary pencil sketching nor any second thoughts, so they’re vivid rather then accurate.
The pen-and-ink sketch below was made a few years later, when I’d already started freelancing. It shows the alley leading down to the handsome Smith’s Wharf warehouse, seen at low tide with swans and mud in front of it, crane cables hanging overhead. It had survived the Blitz but was already being surrounded by its even more devastating successor, the City’s redevelopment. Here is a more painstaking pen drawing of South Kensington – a studenty pastiche of a Victorian wood engraving, which may have tempted me to start wood engraving myself, a major turning point for me at the time.
The drawing beneath it shows the redevelopment just beginning, the minimal fencing-off and the self-sown green plants that had taken root after the bombing.
I never kept any of my student life-class drawings, probably feeling they were no good, but I did hang on to a few sketches of ordinary people in real-life surroundings. In the Leicester Square scene below the toy jumps about when the pavement salesman, or spiv in those days, squeezes whatever he’s holding.
On the right is St James, Garlickhythe. In those days I seldom included people in such scenes, fearing that they would spoil the drawing; this pair of onlookers do look a bit stiff. Later on, people began to seem too interesting to leave out.
Just after I left the RCA in 1955, Penguin Books asked me to illustrate a paperback about Mediterranean cookery, Patience Gray’s Plats du Jour, my first serious illustrated book (here). Someone had warned me that opting for royalties was a gamble, so I plumped for a modest flat fee. This was a mistake – 50,000 copies were sold in the first year, and it’s been reprinted and republished many times since. But Patience, who I’d already met at the RCA, became a lifelong friend. For a while she was the Observer’s lifestyle columnist (she was the first) and she asked me to draw these Old Compton St and Fitzrovia shopfronts for her column. In these specialist Soho shops you could find rare and exotic items like olive oil, copper pans and pasta. I’d just bought my first car and drew the Fitzroy Street delicatessen from it. Parking was never a problem then.
In those primitive days the book cover of Plats du Jour began as a simple black pen drawing but the grey and pink colours were drawn separately on film as overlays. Some of the peasant faces on the cover were drawn from photos in Paris Match: the man at the head of the table was a farmer called Gaston Dominici who had been accused of murder; the small girl was one of Picasso’s daughters. I worked on very thin Whatman paper, drawing the faces over and over again until one looked about right, and then cut it out with a razor blade (no scalpels were then to be had) and stuck it down with Sellotape. Now they can just be photoshopped out.
I drew Covent Garden’s Old Floral Hall, then at the corner of Covent Garden’s piazza, while designing the poster Visitors’ London for London Transport. The drawing below is a study for it, where its interior can be glimpsed through the bottom arches. Unlike the Plats du Jour covers, for which I’d had to make black, pink and grey colour separations, the finished poster design was reproduced in four-colour half-tone, so it could be painted in watercolour, the medium I’ve liked since boyhood. I painted it on a large but inconveniently circular dinner table in my Battersea flat, and felt proud to see it whenever I went on the tube.
Many of my early commissions were for wood engravings – the one below was one of a series of press ads for a new newspaper, the Sunday Telegraph. Wood engraving is not a medium for spontaneity – it needs deliberateness, formality and careful design. It also needs a press to proof the finished boxwood blocks on. Mine is a small Albion table-top-sized one, bought for £30 just after I left the RCA. It was made by Harrild and Son of Farringdon Street, London, in the late 1870s; their serial number, 1441, is on the brass cylinder at the top. Today it stands on the plan chest outside my studio door and still works perfectly.
This wood engraving is of a Victorian house in Clapham, in South London, and not unlike the one where I had my rooms off Lavender Hill but considerably grander.
Fifteen years later I began designing and engraving the covers for the New Penguin Shakespeare, a laborious but lovely task. Each play was a challenge, but knowing that they would be seen by a whole generation of impressionable school children spurred me on.
Most of my early wood engravings were quite small, which may have been why I was asked out of the blue to design some stamps. After three different sets had been issued, I wrote to the new Postmaster General, Tony Benn, suggesting that stamps could be made more popular if their subjects were more interesting and the familiar photographic image of the Queen was dropped or formalized. Benn then commissioned me to design the ‘Gentleman Album’ to show how new subjects like British architecture, history and science might work as stamps. For the design below I engraved the old London Bridge at four times stamp size, reversed a proof to serve as a reflection, and added some colours with Letrafilm. This stamp was essayed but never issued, but over the years 103 of my stamps were. Changes of scale were never a problem; about twelve years later I used wood engravings of roughly the same size as this one but twenty times enlarged for the murals in Charing Cross tube station.
The Charing Cross commission also arrived quite unexpectedly, with a call from Michael Levy, London Transport’s publicity chief. The brief was simply to design a mural for an Underground station that would relate somehow to the station’s name, Charing Cross. There was no interference from design management, then a newly arrived and suspect discipline, to complicate the task. The platform-length mural would be made up of about sixty separate melamine panels and designed around the station name and logo wherever they appeared, the wooden benches (since sadly replaced) below them, various letter-boxes and rubbish bins, and the entry and exit openings along the platforms. I began by laying all these out on a blank sheet and drawing even my very earliest roughs over them, and quickly thought of using the spaces between the openings as if they were panels in a medieval book of hours or a comic strip, to show how the original Eleanor Cross, after which Charing Cross is named, had been built.
The medieval characters were the same size as the platforms’ passengers and would stand beside them or roll their wheelbarrows onto the same wooden benches. My references were from illustrations in medieval manuscripts of building methods and early cranes, barrows, scaffolding and stonemasons. I photographed these and made a card index of them. But in Westminster Abbey, then being restored, it was strange to find today’s stonemasons using exactly the same templates, tools and ways of working as their medieval predecessors.
It was a wonderful task. At the outset I worried that the whole thing might quickly be obliterated by graffiti, but LT’s chief architect, Sidney Hardy, said that if the public were treated with respect it would be returned. (He added that he would anyway be laying in plenty of solvent just in case.) In the end any occasional graffiti, even the funny ones, looked puny against the strong black engraved images, which are still there today.
Right: Unselected design for a postage stamp competition, 1968
