Left or right?

Those of you who were unable to attend my little talk for the MA Design Writing Criticism course at London College of Communication a few weeks ago may still be anxious to know whether I parted my hair on the left or on the right. This, and other important questions are answered in this sharply observed and well-written piece by Sarah Snaith who was there (and clearly paying attention) so that she might record these details for your benefit on their blog here.

Art Workers Guild Talk

I'm giving a talk at the Art Workers Guild this Thursday (April 26). It's a members and guests kind of arrangement, so not open to the public. It's an incredible place and I'm flattered to be invited.

Talk in Nottingham

I'm giving a talk (and signing books) at Antenna Media Centre in Nottingham on Monday - in case you happen to be passing. The details are...
The novelist and collage artist Graham Rawle will give a talk called "Writing with Scissors", as part of our MA in Creative Writing Open Lecture series, at 6.00 on Monday 16 April at Antenna, 9A Beck Street, Nottingham. All welcome. Entry free.

Graphic Design: Now In Production

Here's the rather lovely catalogue for the Graphic Design: Now In Production exhibition (featuring my book Woman's World) that was at the Walker in Minneapolis earlier this summer and will be at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York this summer. More details on the show a couple of entries below.

Arvon Foundation

I will be teaching a Text and Image residential course with Margaret Huber (Mrs Rawle) this summer - August 13-18 at Totleigh Barton as part of the Arvon Foundation's Creative Writing courses. It's an incredible place: Totleigh Barton is a thatched, pre-Domesday manor house, surrounded by farmland in one of the most peaceful and beautiful parts of Devon, two miles from the village of Sheepwash. Workshops are held in a newly refurnished 15th century barn. Our mid-week guest lecturer is Professor George Hardie.

TEXT & IMAGE
For anyone interested in telling stories using words and pictures, this course will help you explore the fascinating relationship between text and image and how one can be made to affect the other. We welcome writers and visual artists of all abilities, keen to investigate this subject through any medium, such as illustrated books for children or adults, cut & paste fiction, visual diaries, comics and experimental typography. More information about our course, other Arvon courses and booking details HERE. 
'In honour' of our course Arvon have organised a word art competition where you can win a week on an Arvon course of your choice worth £600. I will be judging entries. More details about that HERE.

THE CARD - Book jacket final choice

This is the book jacket for The Card as it finally ended up. I had a slightly different colour scheme and a different edge colour, but when the proof came back from the printers, I didn't like it and so decided to change it to this. I'm much happier with it.

Graphic Design: Now in Production

Woman's World is featured in a major exhibition, Graphic Design: Now In Production which was recently at the Walker Art Institute in Minneapolis. The show travels to the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum in New York (May 26 - Sept 27 2012), the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (Sept 30, 2012 - January 6, 2013), Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas (July 19 - September 29th, 2013) and Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina (October 24, 2013 - Feb 24, 2014). There's more about the exhibition with films, interviews etc at the Walker website here. The exhibition is curated by Ellen Lupton along with Ian Albinson, Andrew Blauvelt, Jeremy Leslie and Armin Vit.

This major international exhibition explores how graphic design has broadened its reach dramatically over the past decade, expanding from a specialized profession to a widely deployed tool. With the rise of user-generated content and new creative software, along with innovations in publishing and distribution systems, people outside the field are mobilizing the techniques and processes of design to create and publish visual media. At the same time, designers are becoming producers: authors, publishers, instigators, and entrepreneurs employing their creative skills as makers of content and shapers of experiences.

Featuring work produced since 2000 in the most vital sectors of communication design, Graphic Design: Now in Production explores design-driven magazines, newspapers, books, and posters as well as branding programs for corporations, subcultures, and nations. It also showcases a series of developments over the past decade, such as the entrepreneurial nature of designer-produced goods; the renaissance in digital typeface design; the storytelling potential of titling sequences for film and television; and the transformation of raw data into compelling information narratives.

Graphic Design: Now in Production is the largest museum exhibition on the subject since the Walker’s seminal 1989 exhibition Graphic Design in America: A Visual Language History, and the Cooper-Hewitt’s 1996 comprehensive survey, Mixing Messages: Graphic Design in Contemporary Culture. Appropriately, this exhibition is co-organized by the two institutions. A comprehensive, illustrated catalogue produced by the Walker accompanies the exhibition.

Pick Me Up - Somerset House

I'm doing a weekend fact-gathering workshop with Peepshow on the weekend of 31 March and 1 April at PICK ME UP Contemporary Graphic Art Fair at Somerset House. More about Pick Me Up here and what Peepshow will be doing during the rest of the event here.
This is the workshop. Do come along.

I DID NOT KNOW THAT!

The Peepshow Encyclopaedia of Things We Didn’t Know

Did you know that emus can’t walk backwards or that Alfred Hitchcock didn’t have a belly button? We did. Did you know that Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise; that rabbits can’t vomit; or that Barry Manilow is an anagram of Library Woman? We knew all of those things too. Why don’t you tell us something we don’t already know?

In our quest to compile a comprehensive Encyclopaedia of Things We Didn’t Know, Peepshow and guest researcher Graham Rawle invite you to provide us with a fascinating fact to add to our archive. It can come from the world of science, history or nature––or it could be something personal: your father’s hat size, the opening hours of your local Costcutter, or what your Uncle Roy likes to spread on his toast. From the astounding to the trivial, all of the facts we collect will be gathered together in a giant Peepshow online encyclopaedia, providing a fountain of knowledge to delight and enthral all of humanity.

HOW TO TAKE PART

At the I Did Not Know That! workshop, each participant will be provided with an exciting jamboree bag ‘kit’ containing everything he or she might need to create a special collage, drawing, written message or mini-sculpture. Each completed piece of artwork will be photographed for inclusion in the online archive and displayed during the workshop in an ever-expanding wall frieze of little-known facts. Your contribution can play a vital part in building this extraordinary archive; The Peepshow Encyclopaedia of Things We Didn’t Know. Take part today!

Peepshow book

Peepshow's book, celebrating 10 years together as an illustration collective is out now, and a very lovely thing it is too. Beautifully designed by Emmi Salonen, it's jam-packed full of Peepshow pictures, info and fun. There are even introduction pieces by Alex Bec, Margaret Huber (Mrs Rawle) and me. Take a look here and at the review in Creative Review here.

GRAHAM RAWLE - The Nosy Neighbour

Author portrait for my new book.

THE CARD - book cover

This is (pretty much) the final design for the cover of The Card, published June 2012. The one below it showing the man looking at the card was 'it' for quite some time, but it was felt that it wasn't quite right for the book. I still like it, but I think my publishers are right. Below that, you can see various versions, both finished and rough to show how I got to the final design. (This is not actually the final design - see more recent post above.)

The women, I mean, are not refined

I don't know what this title means, but here is a review of Woman's World by Modern Review. http://modern-review.blogspot.com/2011/03/women-i-mean-are-not-refined.html

Party Boy

I came across this picture the other day. I took it in 1998 during the 'party scene' shoot for my book, Diary Of An Amateur Photographer. It was supposed to look like it had been taken in 1959. The boy, as he was then, is Nick Wager, a friend of a friend who came in for the afternoon as one of the models. I think he was 14 at the time so he'd be about 28 now. When the picture I wanted was taken and everyone else had wandered away from the little set I'd built, Nick was left sitting there on his own with his orange squash and cheese on a stick so I took this picture of him. It was never used in the book, but I rather like it.

Emblem Of My Work

To celebrate the 250th anniversary of Sterne's marbled page in Volume III of Tristram Shandy, which Sterne described as 'the motly emblem of my work', 169 artists and writers were invited to design the Emblem of their own work. Each contributor donated the result for an exhibition and auction to raise funds for the Laurence Sterne Trust. Here is my effort. 

I have a big cabinet full of old magazines I use for collage. I counted 169 magazines down from the top of the pile and 169 up from the bottom, then chose sections from the front cover of one (a 1944 Illustrated) and the back cover of the other (a 1952 Picture Post) to make the two sections of this motley picture."

Uncanny: Surrealism and Graphic Design - Kunsthal Museum, Rotterdam

Uncanny: Surrealism and Graphic Design, the exhibition (which features my work) curated by Rick Poynor that was at the Morovian Gallery in Brno, Czech Republic last year has recently been showing at the Kunsthal Museum in Rotterdam, Netherlands. It finished earlier in December so you've missed it now, and so have I. The show is 'available to tour internationally' through the Barbican International Enterprises, so I'll let you know if it ends up anywhere else. Here is a description with some pictures from the show.
Kunsthal Museum, Rotterdam, Netherlands

24 September to 4 December 2011

Uncanny: Surrealism and Graphic Design, conceived and curated by Poynor for the Moravian Gallery in Brno, is the first major exhibition to explore the influence of Surrealism on graphic image-making and graphic design. Featuring more than 250 items — posters, prints, books, magazines, record sleeves, typefaces and films — Uncanny investigates the profound impact of Surrealist ideas and images on visual communication from the 1930s to the present.

Uncanny includes images and designs by Karel Teige, Jindřich Štyrský, Toyen, Jindřich Heisler, Jan Švankmajer, Eva Švankmajerová, Josef Vylet’al, Karel Teissig (Czechoslovakia); Roman Cieslewicz, Jan Lenica, Franciszek Starowieyski, Bronislaw Zelek (Poland); M/M (Paris), Marion Bataille, Laboratoires CCCP (France); Andrzej Klimowski, Vaughan Oliver, Quay Brothers, Graham Rawle (UK); Elliott Earls, Brian Schorn, Edward Fella, Jonathon Rosen (US), and many others.

The Card comes early for Clare

THE CARD comes early for my friend Clare Harris who, as my InDesign instructor, has helped me enormously with technical aspects of the design. She has created herself a mini pdf for her iPad so that she can read the book over Christmas. The rest of you will have to wait until June next year.

Woman's World - YCN Book of the Day

http://shop.ycnonline.com/news/post/book-of-the-day-womans-world/

Woman's World review

Here's a nice review of Woman's World by Darby Faeth of the Foley Readers. I love it when people use the G word.

WOMAN'S WORLD    Graham Rawle
Start with the most cringe-worthy I Love Lucy episode you can imagine –– the kind you can't bear to watch, but can't turn away from either. Now filter that through a muslin of schizophrenia and dump it into a cocktail shaker along with cross-dressing, car crashes, murder, theft, and a budding love affair; all played out against a bucolic somewhere-in-England backdrop. Apply some vigorous agitation, pour the whole thing into a ransom note, and… you'd still only be halfway there.
       Nearly every review I've seen of Graham Rawle's kick-ass psycho-drama Woman's World relies on the the word "genius". I was hoping to take an original approach and avoid using the term but I may not be that strong.
       The premise of Rawle's novel would be distinct on its own but it's only the beginning. Composed entirely of phrases written by others, he actually allowed his work to take the course their words guided him on while still somehow navigating his plot perfectly and managing to keep his own voice mixed, as we say in the studio, "way up and in front."


       "What the…?", I hear you saying. 
       Rawle imparts his vision in a most unique manner. Rather than being typeset, every page of Woman's World is a collage of phrase and sentence fragments that he carefully cut from fashion and home-maker magazines of the Fifties and Sixties and pasted on layout board like a blackmailer's demands. The assembly process alone took him years.
       One might reasonably suspect that a jumbled visual presentation would make reading difficult but that's not the case. Rawle is an accomplished collage artist and his choices were clearly far from random (which, when you think about it, only accentuates the magnitude of his achievement). The deftness with which he alternates fonts, text weights and illustrations imbues this book with a rhythm akin to reading a side by Louis Armstrong's Hot Five. 

       His craft yields a piece one very much looks at look at as well as reads (or more accurately in this case, devours); a book not quite written in standard English, but rather in some specialty language replete with more "lady-of-the-house" soft-sell, hard-sell, jargon and journalese than the combined marketing arms of Mary Kay, Avon and Martha Stewart could dream up in a decade.

       And it's a story! Woman's World is a compelling narrative, completely rendered, full of twists and turns (see "Lucy", above) that careens like a drunk driver between the hysterically funny and achingly sad.


       What can I say –– the guy's a genius.

THE CARD - designed

I've just finished designing my book, The Card, published by Atlantic Books, June 1st 2012. The pages have been sent off for first proofs. Here are some (non-consecutive) spreads.

YCN Inspirations - Five Influences

YCN asked me to talk about my top five influences. Here's a link to the piece. Where? Here.

Card found

This card was recently found by my friend, Fiona Blair, near Bewl Water (wherever that may be). On the back someone has written 'Noah's Ark Speldhurst'... and a word she thinks might be 'superstore'. Since I didn't find it myself it doesn't count as part of my own found card collection, but this would have been a great one to find. Fiona has now found two cards so is well on her way to collecting a full pack.

THE CARD - cards on the ground

Here are some pictures from my forthcoming book which show cards that have been found on the ground.

THE CARD – Your Country Needs You

This is one of the cards for my book. It's the third card Riley finds and it comes at the end of Act One. Princess Diana...In grave and imminent danger... Your Country Needs You! –The ultimate call to adventure.

THE CARD – Prepare to Execute!

Another card I made for my book. This, supposedly, is a 19th century drawing of an execution, possibly Sir Walter Raleigh.

THE CARD - a card for the front cover

Here's a card I designed to go on the front cover of my book.

THE CARD – Golf

Here's another card I made for my book, THE CARD. This time it's the legendary golfer William Hollydean, who no one has ever heard of. As you can see, the club he is using is a driver, which may or may not be significant.

THE CARD – May Day

“Who’s that, your girlfriend?” he said, looking at the picture on the card.

            “It’s a cigarette card. I just found it on the floor.” I started to put it in my pocket.

            “Let’s have a look.” He took it from me, setting his beer down on Mr Orhy’s window ledge. “It looks old.”

            “It’s from the fifties.”

            He turned the card over and glanced at the text, then cupped his hand to his mouth and pinched his nose to imitate a nasal upper-class voice. “Mayday. Mayday. Mayday. Calling all rescue. This is HMS Pinafore. Come in, please. This is an emergency. Over.” Laughing at what he thought was a piece of brilliantly conceived satire, he handed the card back and took a swig from the can.

            The use of mayday as a radio emergency call had not until then occurred to me, though I was familiar with it from its use in films and television programmes. “Why do they say ‘mayday’? What’s it got to do with May Day?” I asked.

            “It’s not May Day, you berk, where little kids go dancing round the maypole. Mayday is the international distress signal. It means ‘in grave and imminent danger’. You’re supposed to say it three times. Mayday, mayday, mayday. It’s from the French m’aidez, meaning help me. Didn’t you know that? It’s always coming up in pub quizzes.”

            “I don’t go in much for quizzes.”

            “That’s why you don’t know anything.” 

THE CARD – First

I've just finished another card for my book, THE CARD. This one is of Laika, the first living creature in space. In the story, someone has scribbled out all the words in the caption except the word FIRST. It's part of a coded message. Probably. Click on image to enlarge. See more cards below.

THE CARD - Do the Cha-Cha-Cha

Here's another card I have created for my book, The Card, published April 2012.

Card found

I finished writing my book, THE CARD, last Friday. It's a story about a man who picks up playing cards off the street. This is draft 8 and I think it's more or less there now. There may be one more draft to go; we'll see what my editor says. Then I get to design it. I emailed the manuscript off to her on Friday morning and then set off for a lunch meeting with Peepshow. Walking up Kingsland Road, I found a playing card lying on the pavement. I've been collecting cards I find on the street since 1993, but this is the first one I have found in about 5 years.

Paul McCartney's hair

I happened upon this picture of Paul McCartney I did some time ago .

Congratulations to my editor

Congratulations to my excellent editor, Sarah Norman, who was short-listed for the 2011 Kim Scott Walwyn Prize - the first award to recognise the professional achievements of women in publishing with new focus on emerging talent.
After graduating with a First from The University of Cambridge in 2005, Sarah Norman joined Atlantic Books as an Editorial Assistant. Moving swiftly through the stages of Assistant Editor and Editor, she was promoted to Senior Editor in 2010 and now works across three imprints, Atlantic Books, Corvus and Callisto. Sarah is now responsible for acquiring new titles and for taking complex non-fiction titles as well as critically-acclaimed fiction from delivery to publication each year. Across all aspects of her work she is known for her intellectual rigour, her professionalism and her ability to help her authors reach their greatest potential.

Message 43- Text and Image Symposium

On Tuesday 5th April I will be giving a talk at a one-day Text and Image symposium at the University of Plymouth. The other speakers are Rob Mason, David Pearson, Rebecca Pohancanek, Lizzie Ridout and Brian Webb. More details here http://www.plymouth.ac.uk/pages/view.asp?page=35440

WEBSITE updated

At long last, my website has been updated.
http://www.grahamrawle.com/ 
So what's new on the website? Well, not much really, but all the out of date stuff has been changed or removed. There's a new Work in Progress section for The Card and we've added another interview I did about Woman's World.
http://www.grahamrawle.com/womansworld/index.html
Many thanks to Miles Donovan for doing the business.

THE CARD – Mini

Another card I made for my book, The Card, to be published April 2012.

THE CARD - Mission

Another card I created for my book, THE CARD. Details below.

THE CARD - Save!

Another card I created for my novel, The Card, published April 2012.