Syd Brak

Last updated

Syd Brak was a London-based illustrator. He is particularly recognized for his top selling poster Long Distance Kiss.

Contents

Early career

In the mid-1970s, Syd was awarded the 'gold award' for design and illustration in Johannesburg South Africa by Bill Bernbach. In the late 1970s, Syd moved to London. He started working as a freelance airbrush artist. He has done work for companies including Coca-Cola, [1] MSN, and Levi's.

The Kiss series

The Kiss series that so inspired designer Martin Kidman was another big hit for Athena. Created by Syd Brak, an artist from an advertising background, it was planned specifically to appeal to teen and pre-teen girls who, Brak says, "aspire to maturity and sophistication". Pictures such as First Kiss, Forget Me Not and Long Distance Kiss all contained some mini- narrative that chimed with the adolescent psyche, hinting picturesquely at the dramas of teenage melancholy, lost love and heartache. The icy, mysterious girls, their faces bleached out, their eyes smothered in electric blue eye shadow and their lips a streak of glossy red, inspired many imitations with cheap make-up. They also apparently inspired last year's homage to the 1980s in The Face which featured on its cover a photograph of airbrush-style perfection. The same photographer, Sølve Sundsbø, followed it up with his recent ad campaign for hip design house Bottega Veneta - the collection, needless to say, inspired by 1980s style. [2]

In 1982, his poster, Long Distance Kiss was the top selling poster in the world. It was sold in Athena art retail shops. [3]

Syd Brak was one of the most influential artists of the 1980s, perfecting an airbrush technique that allowed him to create some of the most iconic images of that decade. [4]

Recent career

His retro style posters captured the new romantic / punk era of the late 70s early 80s. They have been sold by the hundreds of thousands. Syd did book covers for authors including John Grisham, Wilbur Smith and Ken Follett.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Josh Kirby</span> British writer and illustrator

Ronald William "Josh" Kirby was a British commercial artist. Over a career spanning 60 years, he was the artist for the covers of many science fiction books including Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Retrofuturism</span> Creative arts movement inspired by historic depictions of the future

Retrofuturism is a movement in the creative arts showing the influence of depictions of the future produced in an earlier era. If futurism is sometimes called a "science" bent on anticipating what will come, retrofuturism is the remembering of that anticipation. Characterized by a blend of old-fashioned "retro styles" with futuristic technology, retrofuturism explores the themes of tension between past and future, and between the alienating and empowering effects of technology. Primarily reflected in artistic creations and modified technologies that realize the imagined artifacts of its parallel reality, retrofuturism can be seen as "an animating perspective on the world".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Airbrush</span> Small, air-operated tool that atomizes and sprays various media

An airbrush is a small, air-operated tool that atomizes and sprays various media, most often paint, but also ink, dye, and foundation. Spray painting developed from the airbrush and is considered to employ a type of airbrush.

Patrick Nagel was an American artist and illustrator. He created popular illustrations on board, paper, and canvas, most of which emphasize the female form in a distinctive style, descended from Art Deco and pop art. He is best known for his illustrations for Playboy magazine and the rock group Duran Duran, for whom he designed the cover of the best-selling album Rio, which has been acclaimed as one of the greatest album covers of all time.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Illustrator</span> Narrative artist who makes images for printed and electronic products

An illustrator is an artist who specializes in enhancing writing or elucidating concepts by providing a visual representation that corresponds to the content of the associated text or idea. The illustration may be intended to clarify complicated concepts or objects that are difficult to describe textually, which is the reason illustrations are often found in children's books.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cassandre</span> French painter and designer

Cassandre, pseudonym of Adolphe Jean-Marie Mouron, was a French painter, commercial poster artist, and typeface designer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Film poster</span> Printed advertising sheet for a motion picture

A film poster is a poster used to promote and advertise a film primarily to persuade paying customers into a theater to see it. Studios often print several posters that vary in size and content for various domestic and international markets. They normally contain an image with text. Today's posters often feature printed likenesses of the main actors. Prior to the 1980s, illustrations instead of photos were far more common. The text on film posters usually contains the film title in large lettering and often the names of the main actors. It may also include a tagline, the name of the director, names of characters, the release date, and other pertinent details to inform prospective viewers about the film.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Quamrul Hassan</span> Bengali artist (1921-1988)

Quamrul Hassan was a Bengali artist. Hassan is referred to in Bangladesh as Potua, a word usually associated with folk artists, due to his down to earth style yet very modern in nature as he always added Cubism other than the folk style to his artworks. In addition to his artistic legacy, two of Hassan's work have come to be part of Bangladesh's political history. The first of this is a monstrous rendition of Yahya Khan, the Pakistani president who ordered genocide in Bangladesh. The second was just before his death, mocking the then dictator of Bangladesh, Hossain Mohammad Ershad. This sketch was titled Desh aaj bisshobeheyar khoppre.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fantastic art</span> Type of art that explores fantasy and imagination

Fantastic art is a broad and loosely defined art genre. It is not restricted to a specific school of artists, geographical location or historical period. It can be characterised by subject matter – which portrays non-realistic, mystical, mythical or folkloric subjects or events – and style, which is representational and naturalistic, rather than abstract – or in the case of magazine illustrations and similar, in the style of graphic novel art such as manga.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Graphic art software</span> Subclass of application software

Graphic art software is a subclass of application software used for graphic design, multimedia development, stylized image development, technical illustration, general image editing, or simply to access graphic files. Art software uses either raster or vector graphic reading and editing methods to create, edit, and view art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Don Eddy</span> American painter

Don Eddy is a contemporary representational painter. He gained recognition in American art around 1970 amid a group of artists that critics and dealers identified as Photorealists or Hyperrealists, based on their work's high degree of verisimilitude and use of photography as a resource material. Critics such as Donald Kuspit have resisted such labels as superficially focused on obvious aspects of his painting while ignoring its specific sociological and conceptual bases, dialectical relationship to abstraction, and metaphysical investigations into perception and being; Kuspit wrote: "Eddy is a kind of an alchemist … [his] art transmutes the profane into the sacred—transcendentalizes the base things of everyday reality so that they seem like sacred mysteries." Eddy has worked in cycles, which treat various imagery from different formal and conceptual viewpoints, moving from detailed, formal images of automobile sections and storefront window displays in the 1970s to perceptually challenging mash-ups of still lifes and figurative/landscapes scenes in the 1980s to mysterious multi-panel paintings in his latter career. He lives in New York City with his wife, painter Leigh Behnke.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charley Harper</span> American Modernist artist (1922-2007)

Charley Harper was a Cincinnati-based American Modernist artist. He was best known for his highly stylized wildlife prints, posters, and book illustrations. Born Charles Burton Harper in Frenchton, West Virginia in 1922, Harper's upbringing on his family farm influenced his work to his last days. He left his farm home to study art at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, and won the academy's first Stephen H. Wilder Traveling Scholarship. Also during his time at the Academy, and supposedly on the first day, Charley met fellow artist Edie Mckee, whom he married shortly after graduation in 1947.

John Blanche is a British fantasy and science fiction illustrator and modeller who worked on Games Workshop's White Dwarf magazine, Warhammer Fantasy Battle, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer Age of Sigmar games and was the art director for the company and illustrated various game books and Fighting Fantasy publications.

Peter Andrew Jones is a British artist and illustrator who has produced a large number of fantasy and science fiction genre illustrations. During a professional career of over 43 years he has worked on book jacket covers, film posters, advertising, and games, as well as contributing to many BBC TV and commercial TV programs and projects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Johannes Handschin</span> Swiss artist (1899–1948)

Johannes Handschin a.k.a. Hans Handschin (1899–1948) was a noted Swiss artist and one of the leaders of the Basel graphic art movement known for their art deco posters.

Michael English was a British artist known for poster designs he created in the 1960s for musicians such as Jimi Hendrix in collaboration with Nigel Waymouth and the design company they established, Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, and for several series of hyper realist paintings in the 1970s and 1980s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Drew Struzan</span> American illustrator

Drew Struzan is an American artist, illustrator and cover designer. He is known for his more than 150 movie posters, which include The Shawshank Redemption, Blade Runner, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, as well as films in the Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, and Star Wars film series. He has also painted album covers, collectibles, and book covers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Enzo Sciotti</span> Italian artist and illustrator (1944–2021)

Enzo Sciotti was an Italian artist and illustrator. Sciotti was known for his illustrations of more than 3000 movie posters, typically for horror films, including The Beyond, Demons, The Blood of Heroes and several other Lucio Fulci, Dario Argento, and Lamberto Bava films. He also painted covers for comics and home video releases.

Joseph Binder was an Austrian graphic designer and painter. He is recognized as one of the pioneers of the modern poster, noted for his refined, stylized images and high-impact colors. Some of his best known works include posters for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the U.S. Army Air Corps and the American Red Cross.

Frederick John Watson was a Canadian fashion illustrator and painter from Barrie, Ontario. He is best known for his international paintings of women, fashion illustrations and theater and Art Deco posters. He has also created a fine art print collection of stylized women reminiscent of the Art Deco style. The start of inspiration for his work came from a woman he saw on Madison Avenue in New York City, wearing black, high heels, a diamond brooch, and carrying an umbrella.

References

  1. http://www.sydbrak.co.uk/page4/files/page4-1014-full.html
  2. Baker, Lindsay (10 November 2001). "Wonderwalls". the Guardian.
  3. "'Long Distance Kiss': How Syd Brak's visionary work helped define the 80s". Dangerous Minds. Retrieved 20 January 2021.
  4. "Illustrations - Folio illustration agency". Folio illustration agency.

General