Alan Aldridge
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Alan Aldridge is a British artist, born in 1943, known for such designs as the poster to the film Chelsea Girls.
Career
During the 1960s and 1970s he was responsible for a great many album covers, and helped create the graphic style of that era. He designed a series of science fiction book covers for Penguin Books. He made a big impression with his illustrations for The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics. He also provided illustrations for "The Penguin Book of Comics", a history of British and American comic art. His work was characterised by a flowing, cartoony style and soft airbrushing - very much in step with the psychedelic styles of the times. In the theatre, in February 1969 he designed the graphics for controversial Jane Arden (director) play Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven at the London Arts Laboratory, Drury Lane.
He is possibly best known, however, for the picture book The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper Feast (1973), a series of illustrations of anthropomorphic insects and other creatures, which he created in collaboration with William Plomer, who wrote the accompanying verses. This was based on William Roscoe's poem of the same name, but was inspired when Aldridge read that John Tenniel had told Lewis Carroll it was impossible to draw a wasp in a wig.
Aldridge also created the artwork for Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy by Elton John in 1975.
Alan was interviewed in a BBC Man Alive documentary on the upward mobility of working class people, transmitted on 10 May 1967.
"Aldridge was the 'Guv'nor'...........no one comes close to matching his influence on illustration in the 20th Century!....." -Sir John Betjeman - Times Literary Review. 1975
Other works
- Cover design for A Quick One by The Who (1966)
- The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics (1969)
- "Ann In The Moon" (1970), with story by Frances D. Francis
- The Ship's Cat (1977), with verses by Richard Adams.
- The Peacock Party(1979) and The Lion's Cavalcade (1980), sequels to The Butterfly Ball, based on anonymous sequels to Roscoe's version, both illustrated in collaboration with Harry Wilcock, and with verses by George E. Ryder and Ted Walker respectively.
- Phantasia: Of Docklands, Rocklands and Dodos (1981), illustrated in collaboration with Harry Wilcock
- The Gnole (1999), with Steve Boyett and Maxine Miller.
- He is also credited for Art Direction and Illustration on Light Grenades (2006), the 6th Studio album for Incubus (band).
