I’ve always wanted a pin up girl tattoo but I’m concerned  that she wouldn’t live up my to expectations. Does that sound like a strange desire for a woman? Perhaps, but I’ve always liked pin up art and have recently purchased Taschen’s The Great American Pin up from Urban Outfitters.

My Own Honeyrider

I woke up on Saturday morning with the most horrific hangover, and by 10am I was just praying for the day to end, so I could curl up into the duvet. Ha – no such luck.

Sitting in the car, dark glasses over my eyes, and praying that Mr E’s driving wouldn’t send me over the edge, we passed this little Art Deco shop (Behind the Boxes), which I pass every weekend and always want to go in, but never do.

Anyway Mr E was quite keen to take a look, so we stopped. There were loads of things that I could have quite happily walked away with – and we did succumb to a huge wooden Red Indian, who is starting to scare the crap out of my youngest and a gorgeous art deco lampshade.

As we were leaving I noticed this print in the back of the van, outside the shop, and enquired whether it was for sale. We had to do a bit of bartering but we managed to grap that as well. Not bad for a day which I wanted to end as soon as it had begun!

And what a print it is – you will probably recognise it.

Tina, as she is called, is part of a series that J H Lynch produced for Boots, the chemist.

These retro prints, including those by Tretchikoff, are becoming seriously popular – so I was really chuffed to find one. You  might recognise them from Stanley Kubrik’s Clockwork Orange.

Tina, seems to have been quite a favourite muse – along with Nymph, Lisa and Maria (to name but a few):

The funny thing is everytime I look at her I just want to start humming that tune in Dr No – “Underneath the Mango Tree.”

She’s my little Bond girl – and in fact rather reminiscent of Miss Taro, in Dr No – what do you think?

Tretchikoff and Lynch were viewed rather dimly by art critics – who described their work as mass market art.

However, at the time, for those that had lived through the austere post war period, it was a glimpse of the exotic – particularly Tretchikoff’s images of The Chinese Girl, Miss Wong  and Lady of the Orient:

Indeed, designer, Wayne Hemmingway is a great defender of this kind of art, saying:

“I’ve got 70 or 80 prints. It is more than just what the art looks like. It is what it stands for. The idea of having a Constable on my wall, I wouldn’t see the point of it.

“A Tretchikoff – it means it’s exotic, it means something about my background and where I’m from and my nan. Art can be all things, it doesn’t have to be something that is beautifully painted.”

“Tretchikoff achieved what Andy Warhol stated he wanted to but never could because of his coolness.”

“If you were to go out and stand with a picture of his in a cool part of any city and spoke with people who understand modern cool, the majority will say good things about it.”

In fact Hemingway and Stella Mitchell’s collection is now part of the world’s largest and best collection of British popular culture – called the Land of Lost Content, and you can now by the prints as fridge magnets and coasters, through Hemingway Design.

But perhaps best of all, the collection has now been reproduced by Surface View, so you can now get your own Tretchikoff or Lynch mural – how cool is that?

I might forgo the mural for a while, or she could scare the crap out of me, particularly after an evening of having one too many!

Personally I prefer my sultry Honey Rider, singing “Underneath the Mango Tree”, in my kitchen!

Who’s Pussyfooting Around?

When I met Jason Brooks and David Downton at the Fashion Illustration event, back in December, they also had a selection of second hand illustration books. I managed to pick up this really cute one on Andy Warhol (which you can still purchase second hand) :

You generally don’t think passed his silkscreens, as they’re so iconic, but these early illustrations, when Andy worked for the likes of Harpers Bazaar and Vogue, are really gorgeous.

Simon Doonan, in the foreward of the book, writes:

” Andy loved flowers. And ladies shoes. And beauty and shopping and drag queens and Russell Wright china and Florine Stettheimer and Carmen Mirandaa and gossping on the phone and American culture and Liz and Marilyn and cookie jars and flirty boys and naughty girls.”

Oh the shoes – the shoes are magnificent!

“When I used to do shoe drawings for the magazines, I would get a certain amount for each shoe, so then I would count up my shoes to figure out how much I was going to get. I lived by the number of shoe drawings – when I counted them I knew how much money I had”. Andy Warhol

and, since there seem to be quite a few Fall 2012 shoe illustrations knocking around, why not throw some  future stars into the mix:

Samantha Hahn from Refinery29:

my favourite lady Bernadette Pascua from Decade Diary:

and you couldn’t possibly finish without some illustrations from the masters themselves:

Christian Louboutin:

Manolo Blahnik:

Shoes to dream about!

Practising the Pin Up

It’s a fabulous book with many gorgeous images to peruse.

Many people think pin-up art started in the 1940s but it actually started way before , since without photography, images could only be brought to life through art. Since Life’s publication featuring images of the “Gibson Girl”in the 1880’s, the centrefold became a standard feature in most magazines. The reader could remove the centrefold and  pin it to a wall.

By the 1920s and 30’s pin ups featured the Ziegfield Follies Girls, New York models and movie starlets and were starting to take the form of calendars, magazine covers and hand held cards.

The Second World War brought a special time for the pin up. While troops ventured to foreign lands with photos of their loved ones, they also took with them their favourite pin up.

The pin up boosted the morale of the troops – even General Eisenhower and General MacArthur commented publicly on this phenomenon, citing the help that such images afforded to their men. Or as The Selvedge Yard puts it:

“The pinup was a reminder to troops of what awaited back home, and as us men go, served as the ultimate motivator to the male psyche– T&A.  What can I say, we are simple creatures.  Maybe you see it as an objectification of women, but the fact is it kept soldier’s morale up in dark, harrowing and uncertain times.  It also served to launch the careers of many a young Hollywood starlet.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself!

Perhaps some do see it that way, but it wasn’t only men who were making these illustrations. Yes, big names included George Petty, Alberto Vargas, Billy DeVorss, Gil Elgren but also Mabel Rollins Harris, Laurette Patten, Irene Patten and Pearl Frush.

The images I love are by Alberto Vargas. His pin ups have an ethereal quality to them and I like the way the more unearthly they seem the more they belong to fantasy and the imagination.

Vargas drew his teeth on the Ziegfield Follie girls.

From 1940 – 1946 he was commissioned by Esquire magazine to produce the Vargas Girl. He painted many a star, Jane Russell, Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardener, Marlene Dietrich and Loretta Young but by the late 1940s Vargas and Esquire had gone their separate ways.

Vargas enjoyed a later resurgence with Playboy in the 1960s – having to adapt to a less subtle kind of imagery. He had married a showgirl from Greenwich in the 1930s, Anna Mae Clift, and when she died in  1974 she took with her Vargas’s desire to paint and create. He died in Los Angeles in 1982.

Inspired by Vargas, I managed to find a book called “How to Draw & Paint Pin-Ups & Glamour Girls”, by Walter Foster. It’s quite a find.

It goes into detail about how to draw faces, different positions and how to add clothes or take them off, according to your preference!

I had a particular dress, a particular girl and a particular moment in mind. So I set to work to create my own pin up.

Using watercolour and pen the result is harder and more graphic than the 1940’s-50’s originals – but, I had an image in my mind of what I was trying to create  which was a pin-up using my style of drawing rather than a replica of someone else’s. That’s my excuse anyway!

And here she is:

She’s no Vargas Girl – but she has potential!

Like my friend, Mr Selvedge Yard – long live the pin up!