Artist Interview: Brian Grimwood

CIA takes a trip to the East Sussex countryside to study Brian in his natural habitat!

To walk into Brian Grimwood’s studio for the first time is to step into a creative treasure trove of artworks, sculpture and collected ephemera representing a lifetime of curiosity and travelling. Add to this a selection of guitars and, happily on this particular sunny Wednesday afternoon a bottle of Sangiovese Toscana, and it would be very easy to lose all sense of time and get nothing productive done at all. Thankfully, this is familiar territory, we know this space well and it’s a great opportunity to catch up with Brian on where he is, where he’s going and the power of ink and ideas.

“It’s very much like a form of exercise. To enter a space where the world is left outside the door and I can be free with my ideas and see where the day takes me. There’s a fluidity in my approach to picture making, both literally and metaphorically, and whether the first thing I pick up is a brush or a tablet, the thrill of not knowing where you might end up is what keeps every creative day exciting.”

The music is already on, classic blues interchanging with Prince, and we’re looking through some recent experiments. Things don’t stand still with Brian, he’s constantly questioning what he’s doing, challenging his process and hungry for collaboration. “My biggest fear is boredom. After years of constant practice I feel utterly fluent in my own visual language, so the real question is, what am I going to say with it today?” His skills have that paradoxical quality of seeming effortless, the casual stroke of a wet black brush that says so much - but only because he’s being doing it all his life. “Looks easy does it? You try it then...” as we very occasionally have to remind a client.

Brian was a toddler when he played drawing games with his father, one drawing a random squiggle, the other creating something meaningful from it. He was thirteen when Owen Frampton identified his singular talent and threw him into a three year creative crash course with classmates including David Bowie and George Underwood. Soon he was designing record sleeves, magazine covers and his illustration career rapidly accelerated from there creating iconic branding for global agencies and founding Central Illustration along the way.

“In terms of bucket-list clients, I really have been privileged enough to collaborate with many of my heroes and been published enough that my more famous works are already well documented. But I’m always looking forward. Those jobs were just rehearsals for the next big thing. The brief that takes me well outside my comfort zone and forces me to birth ideas in an entirely new way. It’s not enough for an image to have visual beauty, that should be an inherent happy side effect of a well considered concept that interprets a client’s problems or desires in a completely original intellectual reaction.”

He’ll often warm up with the iPad. “It’s such a great tool for throwing initial thoughts around and moreover, playing with colour in a very immediate way.” Brian’s use of wit and colour is the envy of many including Sir Peter Blake who wrote the forward for his autobiograpy and said as much. But he’ll invariably end up with blackened fingers as the day progresses. “Yes, I get a lot of satisfaction taking a simple object or animal and rendering it beautifully if that’s the full extent of a brief. But it’s so much more engaging to be brought into a conversation in it’s embryonic beginnings and have the opportunity through dialogue and experimentation to really contribute to the crafting of a new idea."

More of Brian's brilliance here. 

 

 

 

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