The Lost Art Of Painting Posters

This weekend I went to a film fair in Camden Town, and there, sitting quietly surrounded by his artwork (alongside actors Emily Booth and Nicholas Ball) was my old pal Graham Humphreys, the ridiculously modest, charming (and it must be said, deeply eccentric) artist behind some of the most iconic film posters ever painted. The posters of the past were always more than the sum of their parts. They were windows into the imagination that crystallised ideas, promising to fulfil fantasies. But while the major studios were simply content to announce that they had signed Bette Davis or Humphrey Bogart, the independent filmmakers had to work harder. They had no stars but could promise thrills. The gap between what they suggested and what they delivered was often very wide; if their film featured a man in a motheaten gorilla suit and a space helmet, the poster could show a spaceship firing a deathray at the earth, and often it was the poster that reshaped our recollection of the film. In this sense, film posters lied to the public, but it was a lie with a knowing, collusive wink. In its heyday, the idea that a film poster could encapsulate the entire experience of seeing the film reached even the biggest movies. When I was fifteen, every inch of my bedroom was covered in film posters from the golden age of illustration, and my favourites were by the biggest liars, including Robert McGinnis, the master of gravity-defying action. His artwork for 'Thunderball', 'You Only Live Twice', 'The Mercenaries' and 'Krakatoa, East of Java' all feature exaggerated poses in which adventurers and adoring women lean at absurd angles against exploding backgrounds. During my first job as a junior writer in a Charlotte Street advertising agency, I watched as hundreds of pieces of original art, including elaborate dioramas and poster-paint masterpieces created for the Rank Film Organisation in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, were broken up and tossed into rubbish bins. Typically, they were seen as ephemeral and worthless. The underpaid and undervalued UK artists who utilised the UK's unique quad shape did not own their own work, and were rarely able to keep copies. By the time we started our own film marketing company photography was replacing artwork, actors were seeking image approval, and artists' interpretations were no longer wanted as Hollywood tightened its control on copyright. Graham was one of the few artists left who recreated classic cinema. His pigments recalled 1950s Eastman film stock and the lighting of Hammer films. He was fond of using the kind of fierce chiaroscuro that would not have looked out of place in Michael Powell's 'Peeping Tom'. We began working together on projects like the 'Nightmare On Elm Street' films and the 'Evil Dead' series, throwing around ideas, with Graham creating artwork while I wrote straplines. As movie posters became anaemic, dull, studio-approved clones, Graham painted in visceral, almost violent splashes of colour. He ended up doing quite a few of my book jackets. Asked to create a sunny Victorian Oxford picnic scene for Michael Palin's charming, underrated film 'American Friends' he first threw brown paint all over his art-paper, using so much liquid that it wrinkled. Then he painted over the entire sheet, obliterating the original colour and producing an exquisite picture of summer. I asked him why he had first painted the brown layer and he explained; 'You know that feeling you get when you sit on English grass and first have to check to make sure it's not damp? I wanted that.'
This is the artist as an instinctive visualiser, but coupled with a rigorous level of control. Graham shared my love of the horror genre, the licence it gave to use exciting lighting effects, bizarre exaggeration, and something else that only an artist understands — the ability to make a horrific or disturbing image strangely graceful and desirable. Without this indefinable appeal, horror, noir and the fantastic can be merely unpalatable and unattractive. Hovering on the border of the grotesque, the freakish, the downright nightmare-inducing, his artwork is never crude, and the result is meticulously measured to capture the elusive appeal of genre movies. His book 'Drawing Blood' contains 120 stunning posters. There's a sense of frustration that film posters have, in the last two decades, been hijacked by corporations and have failed to show us exaggerated dreams. Graham has always added that dimension, expanding our view of a film to what we hope it would deliver, rather than just what it gives us. He's a one-man argument for painting on posters making a comeback.