T-shirt design
Back in London, I used to have a small business designing and producing T-shirts. These I sold in Covent Garden with my good old friend Tris Rees-Boughton. We were 'The Washable Art Company' and created silk-screen printed, and hand-painted T-shirts for the tourists who frequented the famous craft market in the centre of London. I enjoyed creating individual designs along various themes that I rarely repeated. As time went on, I developed different styles for the different types of punter. As I remember our best customers were German, Japanese and Italian, but rarely French.
In the beginning, I started practicing by copying famous paintings by artists such as Matisse, Picasso and Klee. Some artists are easier to replicate and these only took one hour per shirt using specific water-based acrylic fabric colours. Below is a photo of the first batch of T-shirts I ever made. Spot the famous paintings! And to think, one of these could have been yours for only twenty-five pounds! What a bargain.
Famous paintings grab attention but were only a starting point, so I began designing simple eye-catching designs with flowers, lizards, cats, and Jazz instruments in bold colours. I was happy when these were well received and of course were cheaper to produce as they took less time to paint. However, I still had to iron each one for at least five minutes to 'set' the colour and make it machine-washable. in fact, I spent a long long time at the ironing board in those days and soon learned to love it! Thinking of new designs and colour combinations was great fun and allowed me a wonderful freedom of expression. Especially since there was usually a customer for a shirt no matter how dodgy I thought it looked! Take a look at these - they are typical of the early designs.
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I had always been a fan of artists like Miro, Klee and Kandinsky, so in homage to these greats I embarked on an exploration of biomorphic shapes. Shapes that look like they are living creatures but have strange forms. These made simple striking images and again found customers. Still at this time, I was hand-painting everything onto white T-shirts as this was relatively easy as the fabric paints produce rich long-lasting colour and as they are water-based they are easy to heat-set. We used Hanes T-shirts that we bought in bulk, but tried other brands, although quality varied greatly.
There are three designs below. The lower one was featured on a television documentary on the history of T-shirts. It was strange but gratifying to see my T-shirt on TV as at the forefront of design!
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Finally, Tris and I bought some coloured T-shirts from a company called Mr.President. These were incredibly well made and used high quality Egyptian cotton. Even today, I have some that have been washed many times and are still wearable. At this point the technique had to change. Water-based fabric-paint sinks into the fabric and is no use on dark coloured cotton, so we had to start screen-printing a base using a thick acrylic binder, then painting on top of that like an artist would do on a prepared canvas. This caused a change in style for me as I wanted to save paint and time, so my designs became more focused and less free.
One terrible secret that I now confess is that my screen-printing technique was extremely poor and there were often thin patches where the base colour of the shirt showed through. However, this turned out to be great news, because I used the flaws in my printed rectangles as inspiration for each design. Basically I covered up the holes with a load of squiggles and blobs! And yes, they always found a customer. I sold many T-shirts with a 'Chaos' or 'Space Junk' title, and too be honest - they were pretty good! I also became interested in figures as you can see below.
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The screaming head design above is one of many that interested me for a while. I liked the idea of totems and shrines and these were effective images for tourists from different cultures. At this stage I also embarked on a whole series of 'Chemistry' and 'Geometry' themes to cater for clubbers of the time. I was really enjoying it but the problem was, I was spending all my profits on holidays. Tris seemed to be spending his profits too - easy come easy go! The figure became a strong motif and I developed a series of semi-pornographic images derived from this initial idea: innocuous looking T-shirts that on closer inspection were sometimes shocking. These were particularly popular with teenage boys for some reason! I'm sure when they got home to Hamburg or Osaka, their mum's would not be amused.
Of course, if anyone wants me to create a T-shirt for them now, just mail me!