Michael English (5 September 1941 – 25 September 2009) was a British artist known for poster designs he created in the 1960s for musicians such as Jimi Hendrix in collaboration with
Nigel Waymouth and the design company they established,
Hapshash and the Coloured Coat
Hapshash and the Coloured Coat was an influential British graphic design and avant-garde musical partnership in the late 1960s, consisting of Michael English and Nigel Waymouth. It produced popular psychedelic posters, and two albums of under ...
, and for several series of hyper realist paintings in the 1970s and 1980s.
Biography
English was born in
Bicester
Bicester ( ) is a market town and civil parish in the Cherwell district of Oxfordshire, England, north-west of Oxford. The town is a notable tourist attraction due to the Bicester Village shopping centre. The historical town centre � ...
, Oxfordshire in 1941, the son of an RAF flying officer. His early childhood was spent moving around England with long holidays spent in the South West of Ireland where his mother came from. Throughout his childhood, he developed a fascination with drawing, often technical subjects such as aeroplanes and trains both of which remained a fascination throughout his life. His 'Machine Paintings' in the late 1970s and 1980s are a testament to this. In 1962 he entered Ealing College of Art where he took
Roy Ascott
Roy Ascott FRSA (born 26 October 1934) is a British artist, who works with cybernetics and telematics on an art he calls technoetics by focusing on the impact of digital and telecommunications networks on consciousness. Since the 1960s, Ascott ...
's radical Groundcourse which had a major impact on his thinking. His work included commissioned paintings for both private individuals and public organisations, advertising art for companies such as Porsche and stamp series for the Royal Mail such as the 'British Buses' or 'British Motorcycles' He lived in London with his wife, Jaki, and continued to work right up until his death in 2009 following a long illness.
Career
English's career was launched in London during the 1966, when he began to work with
Nigel Waymouth, who owned the shop
Granny Takes a Trip
Granny is a term and nickname for a grandmother, a female grandparent
Grandparents, individually known as grandmother and grandfather, or Grandma and Grandpa, are the parents of a person's father or mother – paternal or maternal. Every sexu ...
in the
King's Road
King's Road or Kings Road (or sometimes the King's Road, especially when it was the king's private road until 1830, or as a colloquialism by middle/upper class London residents) is a major street stretching through Chelsea and Fulham, both ...
, which was a burgeoning counter-culture and bohemian centre of
Swinging London
The Swinging Sixties was a youth-driven cultural revolution that took place in the United Kingdom during the mid-to-late 1960s, emphasising modernity and fun-loving hedonism, with Swinging London denoted as its centre. It saw a flourishing in ...
. English was hired by Waymouth to create a mural for the shop, which was rapidly gaining international cult status. English incorporated "fairground murals, vernacular imagery and hand-crafted Victorian letter forms" into the mural, and during the same period, he also completed a mural for the
Cale Street
Cale Street is a street in Chelsea, London, Chelsea, London. It runs between Dovehouse Street in the west and the junction of Elystan Street and Elystan Place in the east. It originally formed the southern boundary of Chelsea Common. The street ...
shop Hung On You in the trendy Chelsea area, owned by
Michael Rainey. During this period he produced what he considered his 'best poster' for the underground club UFO established by
John Hopkins, co-founder of the International Times.
English continued his business relationship with Waymouth when they established the graphic design company
Hapshash and the Coloured Coat
Hapshash and the Coloured Coat was an influential British graphic design and avant-garde musical partnership in the late 1960s, consisting of Michael English and Nigel Waymouth. It produced popular psychedelic posters, and two albums of under ...
in 1967, producing poster art that had a strong influence on the youth counter-culture, similar to work being done in the United States by poster artists such as
Jacqui Morgan. He contributed artwork, including two covers (issues 4 and 13) for the radical
OZ magazine as part of Hapshash a collaboration which continued for two years. Throughout this time, English produced posters for leading performers such as
Pink Floyd
Pink Floyd are an English Rock music, rock band formed in London in 1965. Gaining an early following as one of the first British psychedelic music, psychedelic groups, they were distinguished by their extended compositions, sonic experiments ...
and
Jimi Hendrix
James Marshall "Jimi" Hendrix (born Johnny Allen Hendrix; November 27, 1942September 18, 1970) was an American singer-songwriter and musician. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential guitarists of all time. Inducted ...
. He also created posters for the 1968 Liverpool Love Festival, and Love Me Film Productions.
English has been credited with creating "an English form of psychedelic poster art". English's works used contemporary
Op Art
Op art, short for optical art, is a style of visual art that uses distorted or manipulated geometrical patterns, often to create optical illusions. It began in the early 20th century, and was especially popular from the 1960s on, the term "Op ...
techniques to create a visually jarring effect for the viewer, and had a bold, carnivalesque style similar to
Pop Art. He also used evocative references to the decadent spirit of the 1890s
Art Nouveau
Art Nouveau ( ; ; ), Jugendstil and Sezessionstil in German, is an international style of art, architecture, and applied art, especially the decorative arts. It was often inspired by natural forms such as the sinuous curves of plants and ...
influences, such as
Alphonse Mucha
Alfons Maria Mucha (; 24 July 1860 – 14 July 1939), known internationally as Alphonse Mucha, was a Czech painter, illustrator, and graphic artist. Living in Paris during the Art Nouveau period, he was widely known for his distinctly stylized ...
's posters, and the works of
Aubrey Beardsley
Aubrey Vincent Beardsley ( ; 21 August 187216 March 1898) was an English illustrator and author. His black ink drawings were influenced by Woodblock printing in Japan, Japanese woodcuts, and depicted the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. ...
(a popular 1966 exhibit of Beardsley's works was held at the
Victoria and Albert Museum
The Victoria and Albert Museum (abbreviated V&A) in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.8 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and named after Queen ...
). Other influences were eclectic and culturally wide-ranging, such as
William Blake
William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his life, Blake has become a seminal figure in the history of the Romantic poetry, poetry and visual art of the Roma ...
,
Max Ernst
Max Ernst (; 2 April 1891 – 1 April 1976) was a German-born painter, sculptor, printmaker, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and surrealism in Europe. He had no formal artistic trai ...
,
Magritte,
Disney
The Walt Disney Company, commonly referred to as simply Disney, is an American multinational mass media and entertainment industry, entertainment conglomerate (company), conglomerate headquartered at the Walt Disney Studios (Burbank), Walt Di ...
animation, Hindu symbolism, Japanese and Middle Eastern decorative designs, engravings of indigenous Americans, and other cultural ephemera that
George Melly
Alan George Heywood Melly (17 August 1926 – 5 July 2007) was an English jazz and blues singer, critic, writer, and lecturer. From 1965 to 1973, he was a film and television critic for ''The Observer''; he also lectured on art history, with an ...
described as "a visionary and hallucinatory bouillabaisse".
In the 1970s, English moved away from psychedelic imagery towards Hyper Realist work, employing
airbrush
An airbrush is a small, air-operated tool that atomizes and sprays various media, most often paint, but also ink, dye, and make-up. Spray painting developed from the airbrush and is considered to employ a type of airbrush.
History
Up unt ...
. He produced several different series of paintings, The Food Paintings (1969–70), including Fried Egg and Ketchup, The Rubbish Posters (1970), with the iconic 'Coke', an airbrush image of a used Coca-Cola bottle cap, and the Strikes Water Prints (1971) with images such as Ball Strikes Water. English's posters from this period sold in the millions. This shift towards a focus on concrete decadence perhaps prefigured
punk rock
Punk rock (also known as simply punk) is a rock music genre that emerged in the mid-1970s. Rooted in 1950s rock and roll and 1960s garage rock, punk bands rejected the corporate nature of mainstream 1970s rock music. They typically produced sh ...
in London. English also experimented with environmentalist
happening
A happening is a performance, event, or situation art, usually as performance art. The term was first used by Allan Kaprow in 1959 to describe a range of art-related events.
History
Origins
Allan Kaprow first coined the term "happening" i ...
s and oil lamp projections. In the mid to late 1970s and the 1980s he focused more keenly on two seemingly contrasting themes, the Machine Paintings, which are highly detailed sections of trains, planes and trucks and the Nature Paintings, which provided close-up fragments of nature images such as ivy leaves often juxtaposed with hard man-made surfaces. His interest in both these themes continued to play a major part in his subsequent career resulting in several large scale paintings.
[English, M. 1989, The Anatomy of Illusion, Dragon's World ()]
See also
*
Printmaking
Printmaking is the process of creating work of art, artworks by printing, normally on paper, but also on fabric, wood, metal, and other surfaces. "Traditional printmaking" normally covers only the process of creating prints using a hand proces ...
*
Swinging London
The Swinging Sixties was a youth-driven cultural revolution that took place in the United Kingdom during the mid-to-late 1960s, emphasising modernity and fun-loving hedonism, with Swinging London denoted as its centre. It saw a flourishing in ...
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:English, Michael
1941 births
2009 deaths
Artists from Oxfordshire
Alumni of Ealing Art College
British poster artists
English illustrators
People from Bicester