Feel­ing Cheeky?

Cats, wolves, butts and beer… and Lady­hawke… and T-shirts for Haiti. Illus­trator Sarah Lar­nach shares some thoughts on her pro­fes­sion. From ProDesign 106 with addi­tional images.

ProDesign \\ Sarah, how did you get into illus­tra­tion?
Sarah Lar­nach \\ Two years ago I found myself sim­ul­tan­eously mak­ing ‘fan art’ por­traits for a book by Amanda Max­well, and embark­ing on the My Deli­rium Video for Lady­hawke. It didn’t occur to me that these were ‘illus­tra­tion jobs’, per­haps because they were col­lab­or­at­ive, rather than being cli­ent ini­ti­ated. The dir­ect­ors on the ‘My Deli­rium’ video for Lady­hawke had a back­ground in illus­tra­tion, and work­ing with them showed me that there was more to illus­tra­tion than I was aware of. In Lon­don on that pro­ject, it seemed like every­day I was being asked what agency I was with, and what other jobs I had done. Illus­tra­tion wasn’t some­thing I had really thought about, but it reached out and grabbed me by the throat. While I was invest­ig­at­ing poten­tial artist agen­cies, I was approached by Inter­na­tional Res­cue in NZ, and I went with them because I dug their vis­ion and attitude.

'My Deli­rium' watercolour.

Lady­hawke watercolour.

PD \\ Tell me a little about the Haiti t-shirt pro­ject?
SL \\ Dave from Closet Tee’s approached me to con­trib­ute an image. I believe that Dave was aware of the ‘Art Loves Haiti’ auc­tions I had facil­it­ated to raise funds, and was aware of the per­sonal link that I had to Haiti – my step­sister Emily Sanson-Rejouis lost her dear hus­band and two young daugh­ters in the tragedy. Con­trib­ut­ing to the Closet fun­draiser was a des­per­ate neces­sity for me. I com­mend Closet for the huge amount of time and resources they donated to raise funds, and for the smart idea which gives folks a great qual­ity tee shirt in return for a dona­tion to Oxfam.

Larnach's design for Closet Tees heart Haiti project.

PD \\ Look­ing at some of your work it seems you have a thing for water­col­ours, wolves, cats and dinosaurs…

SL \\ Well, I respond the most to fig­ur­at­ive image, so that’s what I like to paint. I use ‘creatures’ a lot as they have less bag­gage than humans; it’s unlikely that you’re going too look at a Tri­cer­atops and think, “would you just look at those sad eyes… I won­der – did he have a rough child­hood? Such a shame”. Unless that’s what I want you to see. The cats were an early Lady­hawke thing, and were done because Eleanor Abernathy, aka The Crazy Cat Lady from The Simpsons, shares an uncanny like­ness with Lady­hawke, and it was the eccent­ri­city of a cat lady that we hoped to sug­gest. The cats got fun when I star­ted mak­ing them do stuff; like dress­ing as ghosts… but we soon ven­tured too close to cutes-ville. The logical and mature pro­gres­sion was to wolves – way more tough than cats, and dino­saurs – who inven­ted tough. It is very dif­fi­cult to get too cute on a dino­saur, even if it’s dressed up for Halloween.

Desert Cats illustration.

T Rex.

Wolf illus­tra­tion.

Racoon illus­tra­tion.

PD \\ How did you get involved with Lady­hawke?
SL \\ Pip (Lady­hawke) and I have enjoyed a col­lab­or­at­ive rela­tion­ship for years; we DJ’d together when I was in art school, and moved to Sydney together when she was cre­at­ing Lady­hawke. Pip has been my muse and has always helped me to identify the strengths in my work. She has a degree in design, so her visual rep­res­ent­a­tion was always very import­ant to her and as we worked well together and she had a lot of faith in my work… I guess that my work­ing on Lady­hawke pro­jects was a given. I helped her and now she’s help­ing me.

Lady­hawke.

PD \\ What’s the concept behind the work?
SL \\ We were look­ing to por­tray a woman isol­ated in her unique ver­sion of real­ity. Always, she is a bit dis­turbed and above all, alone. All the writ­ing on the album is done by hand, in a messy scratchy scrawl. The album and its singles were to have con­scious syn­ergy; when you picked up a copy of the Lady­hawke album, you should find that the only thing not hand-done is the bar­code. I even re-painted the record com­pany logos. We had hoped that the craft, devo­tion and ded­ic­a­tion would shine through, adding a phys­ical weight to a record that people would love to paw over and hold as they listened… as we have done with our favour­ite records.
Cre­at­ing a record for col­lect­ors was import­ant to Pip and I, as we have both been obsess­ive about col­lec­tions ourselves. There’s no romance in check­ing out someone’s digital col­lec­tion, and less poten­tial to edu­cate your kids, or let them explore for them­selves, without a physical/visual dimen­sion to music – this is how we both got into music, and album cover obses­sion. The Lady­hawke vinyl comes with an iTunes down­load code, which I believe is a very smart way to com­bine the interests of the visual col­lector with aural con­veni­ence.
The first art­work done was the cover piece; Pip alone in her chaotic uto­pian apart­ment, sur­roun­ded by the cables power­ing her games and music stu­dio. Some pieces ref­er­ence movies we like, for example, the one of Pip dressed in a sheet-as-cheap-ghost-costume is from Beetle­juice. When I couldn’t have Pip model for a pic­ture, I would bring in a cat as her body double. The album book­let is one con­tinu­ous image; in real­ity it’s a two-metre wide paint­ing, where the cast of char­ac­ters from the album single cov­ers are revisited.

Artic illus­tra­tion.

PD \\ Your work is also gra­cing beer bottles these days? How did that hap­pen?
SL \\ Becks Bier UK has been releas­ing an artist series annu­ally for the last 22 years. The theme for the 2009 series was ‘Music Inspired Art’, and Becks sought out two known artist\musician col­lab­or­at­ors who have rep­res­en­ted that theme. I think that Pip saw this as ter­rific expos­ure for my work, so she accep­ted the oppor­tun­ity on my behalf. My paint­ings were based on taxi­dermy tableau, as you would see in nat­ural his­tory museums, there are some diorama style paint­ings with dis­play case frames, and other omin­ous scenes with wolves and fal­cons and creepy trees. Where Pip appears she’s blind­folded and look­ing rather ‘hunted’. It might be appro­pri­ate to sug­gest that the series is a little gothic. I was com­mis­sioned to do six paint­ings, which became two labels on a run of 20 mil­lion bottles, six-pack and slab boxes, bill­board, phone booth and tax­icab decal adverts. I left Lon­don the day after the launch party and never saw the cam­paign in per­son… nor do I have a single bottle from those millions!

Becks and Ladyhawke.

Becks and Ladyhawke.

Lady­hawke / wolves.

– MB

Links:
internationalrescue.com
sarahlarnach.blogspot.com
closet.co.nz

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