Tag Archives: Paul Slater

Illustration

The Brilliant Mr Slater

Paul was a great British artist with a unique worldview. It was deeply saddening to hear that he had passed away recently, and it brought back memories of the first time I became aware of his extraordinary talent. It was 1983, and I had recently become the Art Editor of The Listener, thanks to David Driver, who was my boss at Radio Times. He was leaving for The Times and handed over his part-time job  of designing The Listener to me.

I was fairly inexperienced, but I thought I could just about cope with the commissioning and designing of the BBC weekly, which ran pieces from programme makers and a broad network of freelance cultural and political commentators. Part of its USP was the brilliant cover illustration by Peter Brookes each week. The magazine was printed in black and white, with a third colour, red, on the cover. At least, I thought, the cover was taken care of.

About a month into my tenure, Peter announced that his drawings had become like wallpaper at the newsagents — even if the style was different from week to week, it was still black, white & red, leading to a visual sameness, and he felt he should move aside. I also got the news that we would be able to go to full colour on the cover, which added to the pressure of a weekly commission.

Around this time, something happened that was like a gift from the gods. I don’t know how I heard, but Paul had an exhibition of his work for advertising agencies at a gallery near our office on Marylebone High Street. I remember being astonished by his facility, his ability to pastiche, and paint beautifully across a remarkable range of subjects. I asked him to meet up for coffee, and he brought his sketchbooks with him.

Words fail to express what I thought when I saw them — the exhibition works were clever and beautifully executed, but this was something else. I had been introduced to the World of Paul, somewhere it was always sort-of-1914, where babies drove tanks, where the ordinariness of suburbia contained bristling threats, and where the scale of life had been upended and giant and unlikely structures would hover in the air above beautiful landscapes. Quintessentially English, very funny, and absolutely unique.  

From the moment I saw those sketchbooks, he became an important part of The Listener, Editor Russell Twisk being as enamoured as I was. Paul quickly became our go-to illustrator. Having Paul on board gave me the confidence to build a stable of cover artists: Bill Sanderson, Lynda Gray, Mick Brownfield, Ashley Potter, Anne Howeson, Peter Knock and Chris Corr, among others. These artists could work fast and come up with strong ideas.

My favourite moment of any Slater commission was the wry chuckle when he alighted on an idea as you were explaining the story. “What if it was, you know, a classic illustrated scene from Hamlet, but with an, heh, accountant standing there that he was afraid of?” This was for an article about Arts funding. Only five minutes before, it had seemed a knotty and visually unsolvable problem. I don’t remember ever giving Paul “notes.” I knew better than to get in the way of his imagination or try to change anything. He was just the best.

When Simon Esterson asked me to help design the Times Saturday Magazine, we paired Paul with Jonathan Meades, the restaurant reviewer. Their partnership became one of the longest-running collaborations between an illustrator and a writer in British newspapers. Whichever magazine I worked on would soon feature Paul’s artwork, and it was always a pleasure to commission him. His work appeared all over Britain’s media landscape, and the quality of his work was never less than exquisite. He painted continuously, selling his work to many famous names in the art world, working on magazine and advertising commissions as they came.

I last saw Paul at his exhibition at The Catto Gallery in Highgate a few years ago. He was unchanged from the first day I met him — humble, always deflecting any praise that came his way, a wry smile playing on his lips. The work was, as always, magnificent. The elegant surrealism and puzzling combos, featuring, as the catalogue said, “acrobatic cowboys, grim-faced couples in metal underwear, men wearing tiny trilbys and daleks in drawing rooms”, all underpinned with an awesome yet natural technique… everything that I loved since that day in the early 80s when I first saw his sketchbooks was on the walls in industrial-sized spades.

I was so pleased to shake his and his wife Sophie’s hands. I hope that Paul’s heaven has cowboys riding buffaloes, giant footballs, fried eggs in brine, and First World War privates, battling against the lunacy of war. Rest in Peace, Paul.

You can download the catalogue from the Catto show here:

There’s a great book, Fried Eggs in Brine, published by Atlantic Press in 2005, which has a brilliant afterword by esteemed illustrator and educator Robert Mason, who was at Maidstone College of Art with Paul. Paul also features in Artists of Radio Times by Martin Baker, and Radio Times Cover Story by Shem Law and Joe Moran

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Interludes

Interlude: From The Coalface (1970s-2010s)

From Varoom! Magazine, Winter 2011-12

Late August last year saw a firestorm of debate on the merits of the Radio Times of today vs the Radio Times of the Golden Age of British Magazine Design (ironic italics mine). Mike Dempsey, graphic design grandee, had posted a critique of the current RT on his always thought-provoking blog Graphic Journey, and the magazine community fervently responded.

MIke’s point could be summed up as “Modern Magazines are rubbish—where are David Driver and Michael Rand when you need them?.” The response from those still at the coalface seemed to be: “Try doing a great magazine cover now with a bunch of marketing men breathing down your neck, a load of Celeb PRs playing up and a design team of one mac and a dog.”

As someone who straddles both periods I always have a problem with the “It was great back then” approach. It often cherry-picks to deliver its argument—there was some fantastically bad magazine design in the sixties and seventies. It usually doesn’t take into account the massive changes in the industry—way more pages now, allied to way less staff, and with a newsstand that no-one in the sixties could have imagined. And finally it always seems to subtly belittle the great work being done now.

I bow to no-one in my admiration for both David Driver and Michael Rand (especially as they taught me most of what I know). They presided over a period of fantastic illustration, beautifully rich and inventive photography and clever graphic concepts. The bold updating of illustrative styles from Eric Ravilious to Paul Slater and Ralph Steadman found a way to take a readership used to illustration to new places. But the world was different then. It was a world with four TV channels. There was no such thing as rolling news.

Look at rock music, for example, and tell me it’s as easy to be inventive now as it was in 1966. There’s always a ‘perfect storm’ time when the talent meets the market and the market says: Yes! Give me more. Give me more of that different, difficult and interesting stuff! It’s a heady time when mass taste coincides with aesthetic intent. That doesn’t mean that everything that follows is always inferior, but the shock of the new is always a powerful thing.

Photojournalism looked powerful and moving on a magazine front cover in 1968, when TV news was more circumspect (although my guess is that the designers of Life and Picture Post probably thought they’d been there and done that!). So it looks from here like bravery. But you can’t keep doing that forever. And you look to different places for that level of inventiveness. And it’s currently to be found at the fringes of this fractured industry, and mostly not in the mass market.

And the award-winning spreads and covers are never the whole story. Even the great magazines had mundane features behind the cracking Peter Brookes or Don McCullin cover. The sixties magazines technically weren’t a patch on, say, the Fortune magazine of the forties or fifties. Hot metal was dying, the craft was being lost, and no-one was sure what was coming. (What came, before the mac, was the much unloved phototypesetting.) So there were no computers, and all your precious typography was in the hands of a man in the bowels of Fleet Street or on an industrial estate at Park Royal who really didn’t care about your lovely attempts at better line breaks and interesting drop caps. I once asked for a cut-out of a man smoking a pipe in the days of hot metal, and when I dared to venture a suggestion that the blockmaker’s attempt fell a little short, and that it would be good if the pipe was attached to the man’s mouth rather than floating in thin air, being curtly asked, “Who d’you think I am? Fucking Rembrandt?”

It is true that the large mainstream magazines of today are commercially tuned and focus group driven, but if you look around even a mid-sized branch of WH Smith’s you’ll come across the inheritors of what’s possible in magazine design. It’s an understandable impulse to make the comparison of a single title then and now, but I’m not sure that it’s the right prism to view this subject through. Let’s just celebrate that great past, be glad that those people got to do that work. But accept that the challenges and the context are different today and celebrate what’s great now…  tell me that Andrew Diplock at Wired or Finnie Finn at I:Global Intellegence or Marissa Bourke at Elle aren’t doing terrific work, too.

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