The creator, collage artist and designer Graham Rawle, who has died aged 69, of issues associated to most cancers remedy, as soon as mentioned: “As a child I used to be all the time writing tales, making scrapbooks and magazines, constructing collections (bubble-gum playing cards, toy troopers and so forth), making up jokes, drawing footage. None of this appeared like work to me – it’s fairly humorous that that is now referred to as ‘my profession’.”
Graham gained public recognition for his collage collection Misplaced Consonants, which first appeared within the Guardian in 1990. Readers have been welcomed to a world the place kids have “leaning difficulties”, firemen put on “fame-resistant clothes” and footballers “get camp of their legs”. The collection turned out to have better longevity than Graham had imagined: “I initially submitted six. As I had heaps extra concepts and nobody on the Guardian advised me to cease, I simply stored sending them in. There was no actual settlement between us, however they all the time printed them, and I all the time bought paid. I despatched them in for the following 15 years.”
Later collection included Mendacity Doggo and Graham Rawle’s Surprise Quiz for the Observer, When Phrases Collide and Pardon Mrs Arden for the Sunday Telegraph and Brilliant Concepts for the Occasions.
He printed eight Misplaced Consonants compilations adopted by a puzzle and video games compendium, The Surprise E-book of Enjoyable (1993). His first narrative work, Diary of an Newbie Photographer (1998), was a homicide thriller utilizing his mastery of collage to present readers visible clues – and offering the answer in a sealed envelope contained in the again cowl of the e-book. His buddy Roger Ebert, the movie critic, referred to as it “sneaky and humorous” whereas Martin Rowson within the Impartial on Sunday mentioned it was “superbly produced … each ingenious and deeply bizarre”.
Graham was born in Birmingham, the son of Denis Rawle, {an electrical} engineer, and his spouse, Jessie (nee Fletcher). He was educated at Excessive Storrs grammar faculty, Sheffield, and studied graphic artwork and design at Preston Polytechnic (now the College of Central Lancashire). A consummate guitarist, he toured the US with a Beatles cowl band, studying each bass line so exactly that he even included Paul McCartney’s occasional errors.
He paused his musical profession to arrange his personal graphics studio in London, designing e-book jackets, ads and theatre posters, notably for Kenneth Branagh’s 1986 manufacturing of Romeo and Juliet on the Lyric Hammersmith.
In 1988, he met Margaret Huber, an artist and trainer on the Minneapolis School of Artwork and Design, when she visited London to help within the curation of Unusually Good Haircuts, the school’s exhibition of British illustrators. Graham was invited to exhibit and travelled to Minneapolis, returning to the school as artist in residence the next yr.
He and Margaret married in 1991 and settled in east London, the place their dwelling/studio was a warehouse adorned with store cupboards and mannequins, car-boot finds, toys and guitars. To go to was to enter one other world – not not like a few of Graham’s magical creations – the place, alongside onerous work, generosity, laughter and happiness dominated.
In 1999 Graham headed the workforce of artists that designed the huge Hello-Life Grocery store set up for Expo 2000, a world’s truthful staged in Hanover, Germany. The post-apocalyptic art work was designed as an example the results of extreme consumerism.
Increasing on these themes, again in London Graham assembled a gaggle of artists below the title the Niff Institute, to create a variety of restricted version artwork items comparable to The Non-Particular Tape Measure which precisely evaluated such measurements as “knee excessive”, “spitting distance” and “too shut for consolation”.
It was round this time that Graham started work on his most bold undertaking – a collaged novel, Lady’s World (2005), created from 40,000 fragments of textual content clipped from classic girls’s magazines – a labour-intensive course of that took him greater than 5 years.
He started writing the novel whereas gathering clippings he thought could be helpful. “I transcribed all these items to kind a form of phrase financial institution that could possibly be word-searched, every typed piece carrying with it a quantity and web page quantity to determine the place the textual content piece originated. Progressively I changed all my authentic manuscript with the discovered textual content … now the brand new phrases carried with them the voice of the unique girls’s magazines and I used to be lastly in a position to paste up the story as art work.” The Occasions evaluate described it as “a piece of genius”.
In 2008 he printed a reinterpretation of The Wizard of Oz, illustrating L Frank Baum’s authentic textual content with greater than 100 photos created utilizing collage, pictures and model-making. It gained E-book of the 12 months and the Illustrated E-book award on the British E-book Design and Manufacturing awards.
His closing novel, Overland (2018), tells the true story of a 1942 US Military fee to manufacture a whole city on high of the Lockheed aircraft-manufacturing plant in California as camouflage towards Japanese aerial assault. In actual life, Hollywood artwork administrators created an ideal, seemingly inhabited suburban city; Graham’s twist was to have his fictional characters really inhabit it. The themes of the textual content are mirrored within the structure – he positioned parallel pages one above the opposite in order that the tales of the utopian Overland and the darkish industrial underworld are learn collectively.
From 2000 onwards Graham taught an MA course in sequential design and illustration on the College of Brighton and was usually invited to lecture internationally. He was a visiting professor of illustration at each Falmouth Faculty of Artwork in Cornwall and Norwich College of the Arts, and on the latter was awarded an honorary doctorate.
His final undertaking was to be a completely collaged movie adaptation of Lady’s World made fully of clippings from British movies of the Forties, 50s and 60s. Ten minutes of footage exists and Graham hoped that different artists would take up the problem of finishing the movie.
He’s survived by Margaret and by his brother, the actor Jeff Rawle.
