Gordon House- Artist who worked on Beatles White album and Sergeant Pepper - GOLDMARK - YouTube

In the history of art, artists very broadly tend to fall into one of two categories. There are those that can be found under the limelight, they're on centre stage, they're the artists who sort of capture the space, the audience around them. And then there are the very many artists who are often working behind the scenes. Gordon House was an urban creative, a working class Welshman who somehow through a circuitous road into art found himself at the heart of British design in the 1960s, 70s, 80s. He was also a very interesting, very personal abstract artist and we'll see how he straddled those two worlds in his art. In 1957, three neo-grotesque typefaces hit the market. One of them, Neue Haas Grotesque, which you and I will better know as Helvetica, took the world by storm. This was a return to the crisp and clean lines of modernist design as it sort of expanded in the 1920s and developed in places like the Bauhaus. It swept across the world, it took the design world by storm. It was cool, it was clean, it washed away the gunk of World War II and it presented a clean new image for many modern design agencies. At the time, a young designer called Gordon House was working at the plastics division of Imperial Chemicals Industries and from his position there, working in the plastics division where he worked as a graphic designer in a small private press, he could see outside, developing around him, a world of new technology, new laboratories growing up around him. From his own position in the printing press, a much messier world of margins and gutters, of typesetting, of ink. Really, it was this interesting position that he held. One foot in the creative industry, one foot in the industrial world of commerce that really set him on his way. Now, at the time, Gordon House was thinking of going freelance and he soon would, and when he did, he would bring this new Swiss style to the world of art, to the world of design in London. He would completely revolutionise the way that institutions like the Tate Gallery, the Arts Council, the Royal Academy presented themselves in print. He would find himself somehow drawn up in swinging 60s London. He made friends with people like Robert Fraser, Groovy Bob, the representative for the Beatles, and he helped co-design elements of the White Album and Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. He was firmly embedded in that world. And yet, it had been a very strange, circuitous route into his new career in graphic design. Born in Pontydawgwy to a working-class family in Wales, he then went to Luton School of Art and found himself working at a couple of jobs before he ended up at ICI. He spent some time as a letterer, hand-drawing forms for Gill Sands, for example, which gave him a really strong feeling for form and also analysing typography not as letters but as strange, abstract shapes. He also worked briefly as an assistant to a man called Theodore Kern. He was an ecclesiastical sculptor, a carver in wood, who had fled persecution by the Nazis and now found himself repairing stations of the cross in Blitzkrieg churches across England. It was with him that Gordon House learnt some of the art world fundamentals that he brought to his world of graphic design and his own private art-making and ability to work with wood. We have, for example, here in front of me a series, the Tri series. These are woodcuts and they've got a lovely quality to the way that they've been printed. You've got the natural grain of the wood has been kept in these. But these will give an idea of the kind of forms that we see recurring again and again in Gordon House's work. He was a kind of magpie for form and within the world of the printing presses, the studio, looking around at machines around him, the old wrought iron machines, the presses, but also at the new machines in the laboratories that he'd worked, that he'd seen developing at ICI. He started to collect shapes, collect colours, collect forms, tessellations of different shapes. His work is a kind of 20th century grammar of ornament. It's a collection of shapes and colours and looking at modular design, how simply moving certain shapes from one position to another can affect the feel of the same image. Simultaneous with his burgeoning career as a graphic designer, his reputation growing amongst London galleries, London museums, places like the Marble Gallery, hiring to help design catalogues, Gordon House also developed his own career as an artist. He was drawn to abstraction in these post-war years. He looked around him and he saw a London that was still recovering from the war, a place where concrete was now replacing blown-out brickwork, where the moss and the decay of broken buildings were slowly being swept aside and new buildings were rising where they had been. But there still remained elements of that kind of pre-war underbelly. And as an abstract artist, he was drawn to those different surfaces, textures that he found in the city around him. He, through his connections in the art world, developed a number of really important friendships. For example, he'd worked with Richard Hamilton and Peter Blake on their design for The Beatles. He was also a very good friend of Chris Prater, who was a master screen printer. In 1961, he got in touch with Chris and said, I think that you should open an independent printmaking studio, a screen printing studio. And in that year, together, they made the very first pure art screen prints in the UK. Screen printing was to become a really important part of Gordon House's career. In fact, over here on the planchette in front of me, we've got Still Life at Millbank. It's a screen print that Gordon House made specifically in 1980 when the Tate Gallery were celebrating Chris Prater's extraordinary output of screen prints made with artists like Edoardo Paolozzi. It's a fascinating assemblage of colour and form. Gordon House described how what had inspired works like this were things like road and construction signs, seeing a whole new abstract language as the motorway became an important part of modern-day living in post-war Britain, a strange abstract language that was slowly evolving around him. Plucking at those images like a magpie, he was now bringing them into his art. However, for much of his career, Gordon House was a name behind the scenes. He was printing, working for other people, working, for example, with the White Ink Studio, making etchings for other artists, designing catalogues, designing posters. He was a consummate manager of the various parties concerned in any given project. In fact, one of the things that was to great benefit for his design career was that he had both experience as an artist, working with artists, understanding how artists think, and also with the technicians in the printmaking studio or in the typesetting studio. He knew what things were achievable. He knew what was going to be difficult. He was able to temper the expectations of artists and he was able to introduce new methods of doing things with his technicians and assistants. It was that ability to move through these different worlds, to smooth clients over, work within the studio world, the understanding of what a certain project, what kind of labour it would take, that made him such an important figure in British graphic design. Late in his life, Gordon House put together the drafts for Tin Pan Valley, his autobiography. And while it describes the extraordinary career that he had, it also reveals how all of the work that he produced was rooted in his childhood in Wales, the memories of his father and his mother, his memories of growing up in tin-smelting country. One of the problems with abstract art, and particularly the kind of geometrical art that Gordon House was often working with, is that it can sometimes come across as somewhat cold, clean, particularly when you've got straight lines, perfect edges. There is a sense that what you are trading for in strong form and colour is a kind of lack of emotional connection. There is a real intimacy, however, to Gordon House's work. He really understood how printmaking had a particular flavour, how the quality of etching, a kind of fuzzy feeling of the etched metal that would give to the impress of the ink, or the quality of the grain of wood. He understood how that could give hard design a really kind of interesting and more emotive, more kind of romantic feel. In 1984, however, House would make the connection between his childhood, between memory, between the early life and his later work in a series of prints called The Welsh Portfolio. We actually have the title page from that suite here. It's an extraordinary set of colour etchings. We had some of them up on the walls in this exhibition. It delves into the world of his father before him and his grandfather, Bill Evans, who'd worked in tin smelting and rolling in the Welsh Tin Pan Valley. It draws on the kind of sounds, the shapes, the colours, the smells that he remembers from that time period. And it somehow, in abstract form, manages to replicate some of those memories. There's a lovely passage in his autobiography. Gordon House describes how the kind of archive of senses that he built up in his childhood became an important source of inspiration. Inside the house and in my bed at night, from below my front window, the noises, as rhythm, grew glowing with the furnaces and power lights. The presses banged in unison with the roller mill's groans, interspersed with blue flashes from the riveted, plated metal foundry floor. Thumps of malleable steel and the travelling white-hot metal strip boom up from the valley factories beneath their black, corrugated roofing to a rumble return down again and around my bedroom walls to sound finally against the hill behind the house before once again crossing that towering valley below, forever orchestrated throughout my time. It's a lovely evocation of how the sound, the smell, the colours of that time period have really remained an important part of his work. That autobiography was published in 2004. It was published posthumously the same year that Gordon House died. A lot of Gordon House's work reminds me of the poem by Seamus Heaney called Digging. In this poem, Seamus Heaney is sat writing at his desk and he looks out of the window and he sees beyond it his father digging in the garden. And he recognises there is a world of industry, of hard labour, of working with the earth that Seamus Heaney himself did not have. So instead he digs with his pen, excavates the roots of his memories. I think that is really what Gordon House did in his own work, his private work. He was forever excavating the archive of his own life, going through the shapes, the colours, the things that had continually informed him and finding new ways of presenting them, new ways of bringing them together, new ways of placing one thing beside another to see what kind of effect it would produce. It's a really interesting body of work, abstraction but with a kind of strange heart to it, a strange romanticism to it. It's one that I'm really happy that we've been able to champion here at the Gallery. Of course there is a great deal of his work here at the Gallery. We're real champions of his work. Do please get in touch, come and see us and we'll be glad to get some out as we have done here on the planchettes for you to see. For now, I will leave you with the wonderful career of Gordon House.