climate9 defence
Last night I went along to the official launch of the Nobrow flagship gallery and shop in the heart of Shoreditch – right on Great Eastern Street. They’ve got an extraordinary prime location, malady and I happen to know how much it cost thanks to another gallery owner who also looked at the space but couldn’t afford it. Oh how I wish I had the funding to open fancy shmancy shop spaces….
Anyway, prostate I clearly don’t, but I can write about such things on my blog, direct to you from the messy environs of my HQ/spare room. As I’ve written before (in my review of the Pick Me Up London show), Nobrow Press have gone crazy producing publications in the past few months, and no one appears more often than illustrator Jack Teagle. It’s therefore no surprise that the Nobrow boys have chosen to launch their new venture with Dungeons and Desktops, an exhibition of this extremely talented illustrator’s work.
Here, look and learn illustrators, is how you make a name for yourself.
Step one: be extremely talented in the first place. I have it on good authority that Jack Teagle was labelled illustrator most likely to succeed in his first year at college. He only graduated last year, and this isn’t even his first exhibition.
Step two: produce lots of great work. Make sure it gets seen all over the place. I was quite surprised to find that Jack had produced artwork together with his girlfriend Donya Todd for the walls of the Sketchbook Magazine Pop-Up Shop as it wasn’t labelled, but it shows that he gets around and gets his work seen. He’s worked for Anorak Magazine. Why, he’s even *threatening* to start doing fashion illustrations for me! And of course, he’s done lots of work with Nobrow already.
Step three: have a brilliant imagination. Jack Teagle is obviously one of those crossover illustrators who is as happy to produce his own work as he is working to the briefs of others. Witness the boy scout attacked by the grim reaper in one painting and then seen chasing a ghost through a dark forest in another. All inspired by childhood dreams: no brief required.
Jack Teagle, like all the best artists, clearly has a very strange mind. His work is full of superheroes and villains. He adapts toys to suit his own fantasies. He’s obsessed with fighting and dark forests. So far so normal for a slightly geeky boy, but his work draws inspiration from the styles of the 1950s and has a dark folklorish quality all his own. It’s also very now aesthetically, so I was expecting someone a bit more, well, how can I say this, trendy, than he in fact is. A somewhat bemused but accepting recipient of the well deserved attention being heaped upon him, he’s certainly not your usual Shoreditch type; after tonight he’ll be returning to Newquay in Cornwall, where he grew up.
Amongst the beardy fashionistas lingering around the beer barrel there was clearly a bit of money floating around this opening, either that or Jack Teagle already has a lot of devoted fans because those little round red stickers were racing across the walls. If you only have a tenner you can pick up a copy of one of his Nobrow publications, or if you fancy spending a bit more than spare change all the artwork is for sale (well, what’s left that isn’t already sold), and nothing costs more than £300 fully framed. For £75 you can pick yourself up one of a series based on superheroes. I quite fancy the one of Boba Fett, but I think they’d look good all on the wall together. You can also buy pillows, t-shirts and limited edition prints. I’d say this was all an almighty bargain and you should get along and snap something up fast. At prices like these Jack will continue to stay in youth hostels when he comes up to work in London (there’s a nice one near Russell Square apparently) and Nobrow are going to struggle to pay their rent. His work will not stay this cheap for long.
Jack Teagle holds up a book for a super fan.
You can check out more info about the exhibition on the Nobrow Press website here and you can buy his comic book Jeff Job Hunter – a tale of “staplers and swords, desktops and dungeons, benefits and beasts” online here. You can visit Jack Teagle’s website here.
I plan to do a proper interview with him soon and with any luck we’ll start seeing some Jack Teagle fashion illustrations on these pages very soon.
Categories ,Anorak Magazine, ,Cornwall, ,Donya Todd, ,exhibition, ,illustration, ,Jack Teagle, ,Nobrow Press, ,Pick Me Up, ,Pop-up Shop, ,shoreditch, ,Sketchbook Magazine
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