A young, talented artist whose artistic journey is going from strength to strength, Sophie recently graduated from the University of the Creative Arts in Canterbury with a First Class Honours in Illustration and Animation. Since then, Sophie has managed to secure a job as Graphic Designer for a wholesale company, where she creates merchandise for the likes of Centre Parc's and World Duty Free. Traditionally, you would expect someone who has managed to establish themselves so quickly in the art world, to have studied the likes of Fine Art and perhaps to have created a few great, realistic looking, oil paintings or sculptures. Yet Fine Art often focuses upon creating a highly realistic aesthetic to appeal to our eyes and subsequent emotions. Illustration, on the other hand, is based upon imagination more so than reality – but why?
The closing decades of the nineteenth century, and the early years of the twentieth century, were times of extreme social change. It was an era when perceptions of childhood were changing, when children were encouraged to play rather than work in the fields, and ordinary people had greater excess expenditure to spend on clothes, ornaments, and holidays. This led to the birth of consumerism and, subsequently, a need for a style of art that could help to market these newly emerging products to the widening pool of potential customers. It needed to be a medium that could be easily printed and subsequently mass marketed, after all this was the age of the newspaper, but also one that was friendly, soft and playful.
Interestingly such a style, known as Illustration, had existed for a while, but had been mostly used to depict political satire, such as George Cruikshank’s 1820s portrayals of the Whigs in Parliament and John Leech’s 1840s newspaper caricatures of Victorian life. Businesses of the late nineteenth century however, now looked to utilise Illustration for their own marketing campaigns. So, from the 1880s onwards until the 1950s, in what became known as the ‘Golden Age of Illustration’, Illustration became the genre of choice for publishers, authors, and advertisers looking to market their goods. Of course, Illustration isn’t taken as seriously by corporations today, with companies often using 1940s style posters as a form of satire more so than as a genuine marketing strategy. Yet it still very much remains the go to style for expressing the likes of children's stories, kids’ TV shows, comic books, and, as we’ll uncover both here and throughout these opening articles - our foodstuffs.
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