Planet X interviews Paul Garner from Brighton UK on his inspirations and style of caricature art. Paul was commissioned by us to design and create the cover for the debut killer Tone Jones album PURE BLOSSOM FROM A BAD SEED.
Is Brighton the centre of all things horror?
Well, when I moved to Brighton from North London a dozen or so years ago I actually moved away from what I thought of as an epicentre of horror. I lived almost right next to the famous Highgate Cemetery and we also had a local vampire legend – ‘The Highgate Vampire’. But when I transplanted down here to the coast I discovered a small creative hub with a strong horror vibe in the form of We Belong Dead publishing, who produce a regular horror magazine and many amazing horror and sci-fi reference books for which I’ve now been privileged to create various pieces of cover art. I also now live in a Victorian house which I’ve gradually painted almost entirely red inside and crammed full of spooky art, memorabilia and other crap, so even home feels like the centre of all things horror sometimes.
What have been the main influences on your caricature style ? There is a tongue in cheek seaside postcard feel to some of them.
I’m the classic kid who grew up in the 1970s in the UK surrounded by Carry On films, Hammer movies and a really brilliant comics industry, so stuff like Shiver and Shake comic and Carry On Screaming bored into my brain from an early age. Later on in my early teens, I discovered Mad Magazine and it was an absolute revelation to me! My hero was caricaturist Mort Drucker. His ability to capture any likeness just blew my mind and I strove obsessively to emulate his style (always failing) but his work really taught me some tricks that I still employ in my own style to this day. Later on I discovered people like Ralph Steadman and Basil Gogos who influenced me to push my illustration & painting styles further, and there is also the great Jack Davis (also of Mad Magazine) whose work always guides me whenever I’m drawing monsters.
What was the first horror movie monster you fell in love with and why?
It may be predictable but without doubt my first monster crush as a kid was the Frankenstein monster. I first got a whiff of him in the pages of Shiver and Shake comic in the form of the character ‘Frankie Stein’, then a few years later I finally got to stay up late and watch the BBC Saturday late-night horror double bills. If I remember correctly, the double-whammy of the Bela Lugosi Dracula and the 1931 Boris Karloff Frankenstein were featured the very first week I saw it. There’s something about the outsider-ness of Karloff’s monster character that I really latched onto and still do I guess. I’ve always felt slightly freakish and apart from other people, but fortunately I’ve never been chased by angry torch-wielding villagers yet!
How do you start off your projects? Do you bath in the blood of your victims or do your ideas come to you in your nightmares?
I try to keep a sort of mental reservoir of ideas bubbling all the time. I keep ongoing sketchbooks of doodles and little scribbled brain farts and I find this method of triggering ideas very useful. Sometimes I may get a commission or project and find when I sit down and try to start on it that my brain is completely dusty and non-functioning. But a quick rifle through my doodle notebooks and mind-shelves can often trigger some inspiration.
What top tips do you have for up and coming artists?
I think it used to be far harder to break into the art & illustration business back when I started a million years ago. There was no internet and I physically had to slog around with a heavy portfolio to get my work seen. I found I had to sort of sell my soul working on some really bland commercial stuff to make enough money to pay my rent, which would allow me to spend my free time doing the sort of art I really wanted to do. Over the years because I’ve managed to build up a bit of a profile for myself people have become more interested in that kind of weird and off the wall side of my work so I haven’t had to rely on bland commercial stuff so much but the main thing I’d say to new artists is get your work out there on the internet and on social media and pushing & punt it about as much as you can. We’re very fortunate now to live in an age where you can distribute your work to quite wide circles of people with just a click and what I’d say to any developing artist is just keep drawing drawing drawing -if you possibly can draw every single day not only will it help your technique develop but it will, I found, just really help lubricate the ongoing flow of ideas and inspiration.
What has been the strangest commission you have had?
Not sure if if it’s the strangest commission but I once had a job where I had to design and build full-size puppets of a hybrid of Liberace and the Terminator and another of a hybrid Salvador Dali and Dolly Parton, featuring giant mechanical breasts which mutated into Dali-esque melting clocks. Pretty strange but then again it does say ‘no job too weird’ on my business card!
Have the lockdowns helped or hindered your creative juices?
When a chunk of my regular work disappeared with the first lockdown, I initially panicked but then realised I’d been given space and time to create. One of the things I tried to do was to embark on a few portraits of horror favourites of mine that I haven’t really tackled before and what came out were paintings of Christopher Lee’s Dracula, Vampira, Quint from jaws and several others. It was fun to work on them without any pressure and I’m pleased enough with the results that I’ll be including them in some sort of gallery show & event at some point when these things become more do-able. Overall I think my creative juices benefited from the forced change of pace which was probably quite healthy in a way.
What are you working on now and where can people see your work?
I sadly had to pause an ambitious project I’d started a few weeks ago. I’d set myself a mission to do an illustration for every single day of 2021. I furiously scribbled away getting as far as creating 130 pretty detailed pencil doodles of various horror and sci-fi iconic characters. It wasn’t that ideas ran out, just that I developed a nasty case of tennis elbow and carpal tunnel syndrome from holding a pencil for that amount of time, ripping my tendon. So I had to take two months off drawing entirely. I’m healed now so I’m hoping to pick up the project again soon but apart from various ongoing commissions to paint monsters and movie characters, I’ve just started writing and illustrating my own book which has been a long time coming but this year feels right to finally make it happen. It’s kind of a personal journey tracking my love of monsters from childhood up to the present day I’m hoping to complete it by the end of this year and publish it in 2022. My website www.paulgarnerart.com links out to my various media where you can see my latest work both completed and ongoing.