From the Book
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A joint exhibition of three illustrators: Andrew Baker, Nancy Slonims & Martin Ursell
From the Book
14 October - 19 October
Opening Night 15 October 6.30pm-9pm
Andrew Baker is a pioneer of commercial digital illustration and has an enviable list of clients across the design, publishing and advertising landscapes, from The Guardian to Saatchi & Saatchi. A winner of several awards including Gold for Editorial Illustration from the Association of Illustrators, his work has been featured in Novum, Creative Review, The D&AD annual and Images annuals.
He has co-curated a number of exhibitions, including last year’s Happy Birthday Edward Lear, in which fifty illustrators came together to celebrate two hundred years since the birth of the originator of nonsense verse. Andrew is a senior lecturer at Middlesex University.
Woodcuts were the first form of illustration seen in the West, designed as an integral part of the earliest printed books, and hand crafted in a process that bears little resemblance to the mechanisms of digital print.
In this exhibition Baker’s vector based digital images are cut by laser into traditional materials, then printed by hand. The results are presented next to giclée prints from the same files, putting the earliest form of print face to face with the newest.
His new images start where Happy Birthday Edward Lear ended, and continue to applaud the absurd.
Nancy Slonims, MA(RCA), worked at Pentagram and John Brimacombe Associates as a senior designer before becoming an illustrator.
Design groups The Partners, McColls Agency, Yellowhammer and ICA have commissioned work for clients: Virgin Atlantic, Nabisco, Lee Cooper Jeans, BBC Panorama, Barclays and Chase Manhatten Bank and publishers, notably ‘The Four Great Novels’ Dashiell Hammett, Picador; ‘The Chandler Collection’ Raymond Chandler, Cardinal and ‘From Bauhaus To Our House’ Tom Wolfe, Pan Books.
Nancy is Programme Leader of BA Hons Illustration at Middlesex University.
Nancy Slonims’s etched collages, are an investigation into the visual interpretation of collage through the etching process. Having developed as an illustrator working primarily with collage and photo-montage her work has been reproduced on book covers, newsprint, billboards, web-sites and television. However, Nancy’s starting point was in print with a series of silkscreens made as an interpretation of the collage process, layers of ink echoing the collage process, now she is investigating collage through etching, using photopolymer plates to print on to digital, found and collaged material. Attempting to translate the rich textures, surfaces and layers of collage into the particular qualities of an etched plate and resulting print
Martin Ursell has illustrated many books for children including the award winning Song of Pentecost by W.J.Corbett and he has illustrated stories by Roald Dahl, Julia Donaldson, Ted Hughes, Terry Jones and Dick King Smith. Martin was a regular illustrator for the children’s tv programme Jackanory and his own book Hairy Hairy was televised by the BBC.
Martin worked with the children’s Laureate Anne Fine on her Home Library scheme and has published, this year, a text book on illustrating children’s books. Martin is a senior lecturer at Middlesex University.
The Reynard stories, which originally parodied the heroic epic, can be traced back to the 9th century. I am working to produce a graphic account, in three books, of the complete History of Reynard the Fox . Working from Caxton’s 1481 Reynard and various medieval editions and translations I have arranged the narrative around the bringing to trial and eventual sentencing of Reynard. The rural and pastoral element fundamental to the original romance and the Englishness that these stories have accrued over a millennium also form an important aspect of this project. The trilogy will make up a modern, graphic account of these fabulous stories.