Michael English; Graphic artist and rock band member whose posters encapsulated the swinging 60s
Hyfler/Rosner
Graphic artist and rock band member whose posters
encapsulated the swinging 60s
Michael McNay
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/oct/01/michael-english-obituary
The 1960s was when ephemera became non-ephemeral. Starting
from small boutiques in Chelsea, Mary Quant and Barbara
Hulanicki conquered the known world and Jean Shrimpton was
crowned queen; Alan Aldridge proved that covers sold
Penguins; each successive Beatles album sleeve became as
collectable as the vinyl within; David Bailey inspired
Michelangelo Antonioni to mythologise the scene in his movie
Blow-Up; and Time magazine pronounced the benediction. With
the passing of the 60s, none of this curled up into
yellowing heaps of fading memory. Instead, it has gained a
quasi-immortality in the salerooms and on eBay - among it
the early work of the artist Michael English, who has died
aged 68, after five years of suffering from bone marrow
cancer.
English's epiphany was the moment in King's Road, Chelsea,
in December 1966 when he chanced upon the graphic artist
Nigel Waymouth painting the facade of Granny Takes a Trip,
London's first psychedelic boutique. Together they created a
graphics team doubling up as a rock group called Hapshash
and the Coloured Coat. This kind of music and this kind of
pop art seemed natural bedfellows; both emerged from the art
schools to which, before educationists pasted on an academic
veneer, kids had no need of any passport but talent.
English studied at Ealing art school in west London, where
Roy Ascott had introduced an innovative method of inducing
creativity called the ground course. Ascott had studied at
Newcastle upon Tyne under Richard Hamilton. And so it goes.
Hamilton was the intellectual face of pop art, operating at
a cool remove from the actual pop scene, commenting on it
without being directly involved. Ascott was a facilitator,
and English became the most prolific producer of pop art at
the interface with the real admass - a potent mix of art
nouveau with hard-edge sci-fi applied to disposable items
such as union flag sunglasses, T-shirts, carrier bags, and
graphics for the underground paper International Times.
Most of all there were the posters, for the UFO (Unlimited
Freak Out) club in Tottenham Court Road, for Pink Floyd and
Jimi Hendrix, in favour of saving the Earth (already), a
glorious sunburst for a Hapshash album sleeve and, prescient
of work to come, a sensual, vermilion painted mouth with
gleaming white teeth spilling out tendrils blossoming into
fat letters like lush tropical fruit spelling out "Love
festival". However amorphous the 60s prescription for love
to save the world, in his own life those close to English
testified to his kindness, warmth and loving nature.
The unlikely source for the general burst of graphic
creativity was the Victoria and Albert museum, that vast
mausoleum of the art and artefacts of empire which nudged
the zeitgeist with exhibitions of Aubrey Beardsley and the
Czech genius of art nouveau, Alfons Mucha. The images
emerging from the languid and insolent decadence of their
spiralling line held immense appeal for the 60s generation,
and Hapshash and the Coloured Coat made the most of it.
English was born in Bicester, Oxford-shire, and, like a lot
of children in service families, was constantly on the move.
His early education was at a series of boarding schools.
After the second world war his father, Nigel English, left
the RAF and worked for the electrical engineering firm
Ferranti. Some of this may have rubbed off on his son,
because when Michael tired of the 60s scene after the total
flop of a Hapshash musical gig in Amsterdam in 1968 ("We
lost the plot," Waymouth later confessed), he worked his way
through to an unabashed style of hyper-real art celebrating
the triumph of commerce.
The engorged lips of the love festival poster mutated now
into lips blowing an improbably beautiful transparent globe
of bubblegum or viscously spilling syrup. The fascination
with surfaces produced possibly the best known of his
pieces, the Coke bottle cap of 1970, bent after being
removed by a bottle opener and splashed with liquid. The
same year saw a crushed can of tomato juice spilling its
thick red liquid, and an SR toothpaste tube with the paste
oozing forth in a serpentine ribbon recalling the
art-nouveau wrigglings of his first works.
He moved on to industrial hardware, objectified like sexual
fetishes: a wheel and pistons of a railway engine, an
aircraft jet fan, a truck's diesel filling cap, a smashed
bottle lying on a bed of moss. And in all these, the paint
surfaces, the hints of rust, the dangerous edge of broken
glass appear with a heightened fidelity that made him the
must-hit target for advertising agencies.
And so English loaned his talents to marketing the products
of such diverse companies as Bertolli, Swiss Air, BA and
Porsche. All along he yearned to go straight, to paint like
a "real" artist. He went to the Seychelles for subject
matter and came back, of course, with hyper-real natural
imagery. He painted it proficiently but his real talent lay
in romanticising the chill seductiveness of the machine age,
a talent reprised with designs for special postage stamp
issues in 2001 (old London buses) and 2004 (vintage
motorbikes).
His wife, Jaki, survives him, and is organising a show of
his work.
. Michael English, artist, born September 5 1941; died
September 25 2009y
Matthew Kruk
news:hbgdt3$net$1...@reader1.panix.com...
> Michael English obituary
> Graphic artist and rock band member whose posters encapsulated the
> swinging 60s
Hapshash & the Coloured Coat:
http://www.chickenonaunicycle.com/Hapshash.jpg
Colinda:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjN4cNVG4Bw
Big Bo Peep:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GN9Wwz6V6HQ
Michael English art:
http://www.nicke.abelgratis.com/images/image_038.jpg
http://images.artnet.com/artwork_images_424755059_477396_michael-english.jpg
http://images.artnet.com/artwork_images_424755059_477405_michael-english.jpg
http://images.artnet.com/artwork_images_424755059_477400_michael-english.jpg
http://shepelavy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/english11.jpg
R H Draney
>
>Michael English art:
>
>http://www.nicke.abelgratis.com/images/image_038.jpg
>
>http://images.artnet.com/artwork_images_424755059_477396_michael-english.jpg
>
>http://images.artnet.com/artwork_images_424755059_477405_michael-english.jpg
>
>http://images.artnet.com/artwork_images_424755059_477400_michael-english.jpg
>
>http://shepelavy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/english11.jpg
I took one look at the first and last of these and the only thing that came to
mind was "Mucha"....r
--
A pessimist sees the glass as half empty.
An optometrist asks whether you see the glass
more full like this?...or like this?
David Carson
>Graphic artist and rock band member whose posters
>encapsulated the swinging 60s
Not Michael English, the Christian singer:
http://www.myspace.com/michaelenglishmusic