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The rules of the game [extract]
At a dinner party some years ago a fellow guest asked George Hardie what he did for a living. The acclaimed English illustrator, professor of graphic design, NTA Studios co-founder, and the creator of iconic rock’n’roll images, including the cover of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, replied, ‘I’m an illustrator, designer and teacher.’ Unsatisfied, his tablemate pressed, ‘no, what do you really do?’ Hardie is an unflaggingly polite, but most of all, modest, English gentleman. So, after a lengthy pause he responded: ‘I notice things and I get things noticed,’ a fairly unassuming assessment of a four-decade-old career as, he semi-ironically claims, a ‘jobbing illustrator’.
Hardie does all the things that a professional illustrator should: he solves problems; he draws with exactitude; he makes images that delight because they are challenging. Hardie’s consciously self-deprecating titles nod to a career spent working for clients of all kinds, one shaped mostly around, as he says, ‘wanting to do good work. I never saw it as a career thing. But then, I was very lucky – things just fell in my lap.’ But in image after image he achieves something beyond just professionalism: he doesn’t just solve a problem or create a compelling image, rather he draws visual ideas that force viewers to ‘wear a new pair of spectacles’, and open up to a new visual experience of even the most familiar terrain.
The spectacle-inducing images are simultaneously closely observed drawings of objects in the world and collections of thoughts about those objects or ideas. In, for example, ‘The History of English Gardening’ (1987), a single illustration published as an invitation to a local garden show, Hardie delivers a visual history of the garden in a series of images shaped as trees planted in a grove. The layered images reveal a digressive history: there is blue china (Hardie digs up blue china in his own garden in Westbourne: ‘There is a famous poem called something like “The Day in Victorian Times in England When Everyone Went Into Their Gardens and Broke Their Dinner Plates”. I think people just chucked their broken china out of the back door.’); then there’s the weather; a trowel; a tulip (for ‘Tulip Fever’); a knot garden, a map of China (where many English plants came from) and finally a greenhouse symbolising Kew Gardens. It’s a startling visual list, executed so that every part of the form reflects the content and is reliant on nothing other than visual associations to tell a rather complex story.
Seeing and understanding this kind of illustration is immediately followed by two distinct actions: noticing and gathering. First, you notice that, indeed, a trowel does resemble a tree, perhaps even a tree it helped plant. Once you notice that, you begin to see what else resembles a tree. And this game continues to varying degrees of grouping, noticing and seeing until you’ve assembled collections of like things in your mind, collections that Hardie himself, perhaps, has cultivated. Suddenly Hardie has you wearing his spectacles . . .
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