PREVIEW: SAT 8th FEB
2-4pm, in NAC Gallery & Cafe
EXHIBITION: Sat 8 Feb – Sat 15 Mar
9.30am – 5pm, Mon – Sat
EXHIBITION TOURS: Sat 22nd Feb
Hosted by Chris Morton
New paintings by Paul Harvey from original posters and record covers by Chris Morton / c-more-tone Studios.
Re-imagined and re-engineered as Graphic Art[ism], purposefully to create a series of New-Style prints and publications, disseminated in a novel and original style.
This collaboration between legendary designer Chris Morton, aka C-More-Tone, and acclaimed painter Paul Harvey explored the (sometimes) difficult relationship between fine art and graphic design…
It discussed process in the pre- & post digital age and how different processes relate to the act of creativity, and proposed that the term ‘Graphic Artist’ be rehabilitated and celebrated.
Morton was the original art director at Stiff Records from 1976, producing many of the record covers and publicity for some of their most important and influential artists. He went freelance in 1983, subsequently working for the likes of Scott Walker, Tom Verlaine, The Cramps, Philip Glass, Dire Straits and Siouxsie & The Banshees amongst many others.
Harvey has been involved in the Stuckist art movement since 2001 and has had significant solo shows of his work both at home and abroad including London, Prague, Opava and Turin.
Paul Harvey on his collaboration with Chris Morton
“I first ‘met’ Chris Morton in 1977 when I was a 17 year old provincial punk in Burton on Trent, spending my hard-earned money from my Corona pop delivery job on records. I was excited by the music but also by the covers: punk had reignited the use of picture sleeves for 7” singles, and looking back now, I made decisions on what to buy based on the covers as much as the music. As long as they were punk records they were valid.
Stiff Records were at the forefront of this movement; they released the first ever British punk single (New Rose by The Damned) and unknown to me at the time, Chris was involved in this. Graphic designers were on the whole faceless, unlike the bands that made the records, so I never thought for a minute who was actually producing these covers. All I knew was that they were exciting and a bit exotic. Stiff were independent from the major labels, and visually they were radically different to what I had experienced through the glam years (Polydor, Harvest, Bell, EMI etc.). They were also self-deprecating which was just weird.
Stiff were incredibly important during this time and contributed greatly to the paradigm shift in attitude, ideas and creativity that the punk rock movement created, and it was incredibly influential to a naïve 17 year old in a back water town: so influential in fact that I became a punk musician and went to a Polytechnic to study design, although the thought of becoming a Doctor of philosophy relating to both of these disciplines would have seemed ludicrous at the time. In many ways it still seems ludicrous.
I finally met Chris for real nearly fifty years later, introduced to him by another punk academic, Dr. Russ Bestley. Russ specialised in punk graphic design and had interviewed him for his book “The Art of Punk”. It was like a meeting of old friends, with a shared respect for what we had done and what we were doing. There was also a sharing of ideas around the role of the graphic designer and the term ‘graphic artist’; although Chris was involved in design and I was essentially an artist, there didn’t seem to be much difference in how we thought about these supposedly different disciplines. I therefore proposed a collaboration with a view to having a show. This is the result.”
ARTIST LINKS
https://c-more-tone.com/
https://chrismorton.org/
https://www.paulharveypaintings.com/
