The first thing to say about American artists Franklyn and Brendan Connor, commonly known as the Connor Brothers is that they are neither brothers, nor named Connor. They're not even American.
Rather, James Golding and Mike Snelle are British, although the show the influence of American paperbacks in most of the artwork that was recently on display at the Out of Line exhibition. You can see the likes of Robert McGinnis in their work, although I've yet to discover whether they've actually done a Lichtenstein and based their work directly on old covers. Most are accompanied by a quote, at least one of which was by Mae West, although others seem to be original.
UPDATE: Steve Chibnall tells me: "The Connor Brothers do not paint in the style of old paperbacks, they copy the work of the original artists without crediting them. I can identify the source of almost all of their paintings that I have seen from the books in my American paperback collection. We have seen this before with pop artists in the 1960s, turning honest and functional illustration into pricey gallery 'art works'. I think we should know better now."
I've now found an example, which repurposes the original Gold Medal artwork of James Meese:
I love this kind of artwork on old books, so I'm biased towards it. I can imagine a few of these appearing on old Shell Scott novels! [Turns out I'm not far wrong!]
The pics. below are photographs, so I've straightened and tidied them up a little, but you may still find they have reflections and imperfections. The last three images are posters.
No comments:
Post a Comment