Mapping The Terrain: Illustration Collectives

Varoom, Issue 6

Collectivism

The notion of groups of illustrators collaborating on one commission and forming a collective, is a growing trend. There are obvious advantages to working collectively: increased thinking power; support from other members; camaraderie. “You don’t get to laugh much working at home alone” says Luke Best, member of London-based collective Peepshow, “so coming to a studio and meeting with other members removes any loneliness.”

But are there any benefits to clients in commissioning a collective? And can a team with a multiplicity of voices communicate as effectively as a solo illustrator? Alex Light, Project Lead at digital marketing agency Poke London considers collectives to be a very appealing option. “Working with a collective means we can access multiple creative approaches on a single brief, from one meeting. This brings discrete benefits in terms of speed, quality and creative impact that in turn we can pass on to our clients.”

The work of nous vous typifies the spirit of communal endeavour often found amongst the new collectives. The five members formed nous vous after realising they shared a similar aesthetic and frustration at feeling “outside of London”. “None of us feel our personal work is diluted by being in a collective,” they reveal, “rather it is strengthened by the addition of input from others.” They have created nous vous press, under which their self-initiated projects are released, including books, t-shirts and films.

Rinzen are a worldwide collective, currently situated in four cities across the globe. They formed eight years ago in Brisbane, Australia, as a result of RMX, their visual and audio remix project and have since exhibited at the Louvre, Paris, and created large scale installations in Tokyo Zero Gate and at Copenhagen’s Hotel Fox. “The extra pairs of hands available to make light of sometimes heavy work are a definite advantage to being in a collective”, they say.

Ten-strong collective Peepshow certainly make use of their many hands, offering an impressive mix of top commercial work and self-initiated projects. The members met while studying at Brighton University. “The way collectives come together now is different,” states Peepshow co-founder Miles Donovan, “as they work in a similar style, but Peepshow’s about individuals and our personal styles are very different.” It is this multiplicity of techniques from collages and screen prints to stencils and animations that characterise their work.

Geneva-based Elvis Studio inhabit a clearly different place in contemporary illustration. Formed by Swiss artists Helge Reumann and Xavier Robel, they have made a significant contribution to the genre of underground comics over the past decade.

The duo are comic artists, illustrators, graphic designers and custom toymakers, who cite Hieronymus Bosch, newspapers and comics as their influences. Their pencilled cartoon landscapes muddle up otherworldly doodles and social commentary, resembling a contemporary ‘where’s Wally’, where tiny crowds tussle in woodlands and yoghurt shops for space.

The strength they have gained by grouping together is shared by all four groups. Illustrators will continue to work alone: it is the nature of the craft. But collective and collaborative working is a growing trend, and in coming years it may be one of the best ways to promote illustration to demanding art directors and clients.

nous vous are based in Leeds in the north of England. They are a multi-disciplinary collective who describe themselves as “an eager bunch of bearded folk”. They comprise Matt Biglan, Jay Cover, Thom Hudson, Nicolas Burrows and William Edmonds. They formed in 2006 and have established nous vous press to publish their work and the work of other artists. In 2007 they published their first issue of Pocket Sized – which includes contributions from a selection of emerging and established image-makers.

How did you choose the name nous vous and when did it all start?
It began in 2005 when Jay and Tom, working alongside one another at university, began to develop an appreciation for each other’s work and started meeting up to support each other and draw together. As meetings became frequent Matt joined so we decided to solidify our union by naming it. We settled initially on ‘We Appreciate You’ simply because it was the essence of the message we intended to convey with our practice. We felt we needed to account for our enjoyment of foreign influence, literal or otherwise, so we looked at the name in several other languages and ‘nous vous’ was born. Later we met Nicolas and William who were producing work similar to our own. There was an apparent connection between our practice and theirs, so we decided to expand the collective and a joyful union it was/is.

Describe nous vous in one sentence?
Inherently positive, progression-driven, bearded chaps, who attempt to exercise creativity in all they do and have the most possible amount of fun doing it.

What are the advantages of working within a collective?
Support, inspiration, competition, promotion, and the feeling of things being much more achievable, expanding the limits of what you feel possible and of what can be produced.

Do you think commissioning a collective is easier or more difficult for clients?
It could be difficult because various members have individual influences. However, we try to approach each job collectively – actively working together. We don’t try to have a particular style, maybe a concurrent aesthetic, but we approach every job differently so that could be a problem if a client is going off one particular piece of work. They may end up with something totally different, but different is good! We would hope that they are commissioning us because of the quality and originality of our work.

Is each commission collaborative or do you also retain freelance status?
We try to be as collaborative as possible because that’s when the best work happens. With our personal work everyone has the choice to bring a job into the nous vous domain or to keep it as a personal one, and similarly, people can sit back from collective work if they have other commitments. We trust everyone’s judgement.

How does a collaboration affect the ownership rights and credits?
We feel that by being a part of the collective you kind of forfeit the ability to have something specifically assigned to you, but this is a positive things for us as we do things collectively that we may never achieve as individuals. We are happy for work to be sat below the collective banner.

Are there any creative restraints that come with being part of a collective?
None of us are restricted, only encouraged. It is possible to get over-excited by a project where one of us may want to do something that isn’t feasible or viable, but this may then form the basis for a personal project or another piece of work. Very little is wasted.

Can you name some image-makers, past or present, that interest or inspire you?
Hundreds, maybe thousands, but here are a prominent few: Luke best, Justin B. Williams, Yokoland, Marcel Dzama, Jockum Nordstrom, Royal Art Lodge, Michel Gondry, Grandpeople, Ed Ruscha, Ceri Amphlett, Laura Carlin, C’est Moi Ce Soir, Matt Moroz, Seripop, Saul Bass, Kim Hiorthoy, Vincent Gallo, Devendra Banhart, Shoboshobo, Fageta, Korner Union.

Do you each have certain skills that decide who works on which project?
Jay and Thom are more versed in animation, but we all have similar skills in illustration and design. If something requires a particular practice to bring it to life that we are not familiar with we will try to learn it. We don’t want to let our knowledge, or lack of it, restrict us.

You recently published your first issue of Pocket Sized. What made you decide to do this?
It was born out of an idea to create an appropriate platform for our personal work and to promote ourselves and others. It also came from a frustration at feeling ‘outside of London’ and finding a way to showcase some of the things that go on up here in the North. So we took the initiative to produce such a publication ourselves and offer the opportunity to other hard-working Leeds-based creatives who felt they were suffering from the same lack of opportunity.

Do you have a dream project?
Open an institution that teaches design and visual art skills. Bauhaus Mk.2! And we’d love to have an exhibition at Magic Pony in Toronto.

How do you see the role of an illustration collective developing?
It will hopefully develop the nature of the design industry by encouraging everyone to collaborate more, teach and encourage social development.

What’s next for nous vous?
Be able to live off what we do. Be respected by our peers. Have an accommodating studio. Become a creative studio and publishing house in one. Make nous vous press into a respected and exciting publishing project. Instead of waiting for somebody else to publish your work, publish it yourself. It is do-able!

Further reading:
www.nousvous.eu

Rinzen are an Australian design and art collective formed in 2000. Based worldwide, their five members are Steve Alexander (Berlin), Rilla Alexander (Berlin), Adrian Clifford (Brisbane), Karl Maier (Melbourne) and Craig Redman (New York). Their narrative-based works include wallpaper graphics, the design of Paul Pope’s Batman, for DC Comics, and, most recently, Hieronymous Bosch-inspired patterns for the Museo del Prado in Madrid. They have recently organised workshops in Sapporo and Mexico.

Where and When did Rinzen begin?
In Sunny Brisbane in 2000. We all studied Graphic Design (although at separate times) at the Queensland College of Art, Australia, and indulged in some extra-curricular design play that became the first RMX project (www.rmxxx.com). One thing led to another and we realized that we had a shared creative vision, and that the fun and sense of creative fulfilment we felt doing the remixing project was something we could maybe turn into a full-time working situation.

How did you choose the name Rinzen?
We came across it in an Antoni Tapies installation at the MACBA in Barcelona. It was intriguing and phonetically pleasant and when we found out that it’s an ancient, outmoded Japanese word meaning ‘sudden awakening’ we were sold.

If you had to describe Rinzen in one sentence?
Like Voltron, (1980s animated television series) only more colourful.

What are the influences that shape your work?
Our basic skills and education were in contemporary graphic design practice, which instilled us with a love of Modernism, reductive communication strategies and Swiss type. From there our interests and approaches widened. We tend to spend a lot of time image-making as opposed to logo design (though we see the value of both, of course), and bring in a lot of inspiration from books and comics to films and music – anything that inspires a sense of wonder.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of working within a collective?
Having a group of respected peers at your fingertips to offer advice, criticism, help and inspiration are definite advantages. Disadvantages would include the headaches involved in operating with other people. We tried to mitigate this by choosing to work with people who were friends first.

Do you think collectives have more to offer clients than a solo freelance illustrator?
Beyond the fact that a group is often more capable of taking on more organisationally complex or time-intensive projects, we don’t think the overall value of collective vs. solo practitioners is terribly different.

Is each project a collaboration, and how does that work since you are based so far apart?
The typical projects we work on are undertaken by only one or two of us, as that’s all the scope and workload the job dictates, but on larger jobs, or for projects where a concerted collaborative effort is actually the desired outcome, we work just fine via email. It really has shrunk the world, although nothing beats working together in person when we can swing it. Our most recent show Solar Powered was in Mexico City at the Kong Gallery. It featured work from each of us and it was like a shot of adrenalin to work together in person again. As a result the five of us are determined to spend some time working all together – in the same room – in 2008.

What direction do you see your work taking in the coming years?
We hope to maintain a continuity of approach to communicate out ideas clearly and as compellingly as possible. The form those ideas might take could change – we’ve been gazing longingly towards narrative forms recently, as well as more intensive and compressed experiences through installations and hand made/painted work.

Is it important to you to retain your individual identity as freelance illustrators?
There is an inevitable organic emergence of individual identity in the work we produce even though there is a shared Rinzen visual aesthetic. Our personal approaches are definitely important but in terms of how that’s structured (or promoted), so far we’re happy with it being born from the larger trajectory of the group, without being forced.

How do you see the role of collectives in the illustration and creative industry?
Creatively maybe we’ll be seeing more of an unofficial or hidden tendency towards collaboration, where it might not be groups but sole operators forging partnerships or sharing expertise on an ad hoc basis for particular projects, as the ability to discover, contact and work with others is becoming increasingly easy and the technological side of things.

Is there a dream project you would love to do?
Any project whose execution fulfils (or comes close to fulfilling) its creative possibility is a dream project, whatever the actual details are. We’d like to work more with objects and utilitarian items…tangible items that people interact with in meaningful ways. Transpose a little piece of our world into yours. Essentially we want to infiltrate your home and spend time with you on a daily basis. Your house should be happier for it, we imagine.

What is next for Rinzen?
At the moment we’re designing a range of products for the Museo del Prado in Madrid – drawing on the animals of the Hieryonymus Bosch painting The Garden of Earthly Delights. We’re also working on patterns for porcelain – a new direction that we’re very excited about.

Futher reading:
www.rinzen.com

Elvis Studio are a graphic design and illustration collective founded in 1996 by Helge reumann and Xavier Robel. Their work has appeared in comics and in publications including Strapazine, Kramer’s Ergot and Blab!. They recently released their third book, Elvis Road, featuring a single 24-foot long drawing, created over the course of one year. Like the other collectives featured here, Elvis Studio are challenging the normal rules of illustration by working as a team and contributing to each others thinking processes.

Where did the name Elvis Studio come from?
We wanted something that remains open by its meaning yet close to western civilisation, and which sounds a little stupid (we discovered Elvis wasn’t stupid after more thorough reading on the subject!). Sometimes an Elvis Presley fan club calls us up to ask if we want to advertise in a special Memphis fanzine issue. They get angry because we don’t want to. They say we shouldn’t make fun of the king’s name!

If you had to describe Elvis Studio in one sentence?
Pencil drawings, comics, stuffed ducks and burning buildings – so far.

What are the influences that shape your work?
Reumann: As a kid I read a lot of comics and was fascinated by the paintings of Breughel and Bosch. As a teenager it was all the new comics in France when they mixed it with punk and the magazine Zoulou. For no I’m watching a lot of movies and reading sociology books. I’m very happy that new comic anthologies have appeared such as Kramer’s Ergot in America and Glomp in Finland. There are a lot of very interesting new experiments in sight.
Robel: It used to be music and subculture readings. Now it is the sound of our studio refrigerator and the local newspaper’s zeitgeist.

Can you talk briefly about your background and training?
Reumann: I studied graphic design in the Ecole des arts decoratifs in Geneva. In my twenties I went out to concerts and drank heavily, then I decided that I should take my work more seriously and started the Elvis Studio with Xavier. It helped my crisis.
Robel: I don’t have any academic training. My father used to have an endless library filled with black and white photography books, which I loved. I worked with scanners and computers after secondary school for a few years until I decided I had enough of them and then started Elvis Studio.

What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages of being in an illustration collective?
The advantages are that we get to make work as a duo, which we would never make on our own. The disadvantages for us is that we are sometimes so busy we have to turn down work in order to make room for our personal work, which is still very important to us.

Can you talk about your working practices as a duo?
We talk about the size and the theme of the drawing we are going to make. All of the working processes are quite intuitive. Ego has no place in such work. Sometimes we work on different drawings, rotating our work to keep it exciting.

Do you think the role of an illustration collective has altered over the last decade and if so how?
We’re not sure if the role of illustration collectives have changed but ours certainly has. We have many offers to work on commissions now, but we are more interested in our personal projects, both as a duo and individually, so we are beginning to turn down commissions. This means we have less money but certainly more creative freedom.

How important is it for you both to continue your solo work, away from Elvis Studio?
It may give a together impression if we only do work as a duo, but somehow we need to escape sometimes from this and refresh our ideas. The solo work gives ammunition to our work as a duo and vice-versa.

The title of your recent book Elvis Road is also the name of one of your largest drawings to date. Can you tell us about both?
We cut a 30cm wide piece from a paper roll, which happened to be nine meters long. It could have been more, or less. We had planned to work on it for about two years but actually completed it within nine months. It was first published in 2002 by Pipifax, a very small publisher in Zurich, and the second edition is published by Buenaventura press in Oakland, California. We are actually working on some new large-scale pencil drawings together that will also be published as a book by Buenaventura.

Is the tactile nature of your work, such as the accordion book and your collaborative toys, important to you?
For the accordion it was more a technical problem to resolve.
It is more important for us to make good drawings than fancy bookbinding. The toys’ tactile nature is very important. This is why it is difficult to make exhibitions with them. Should we keep them from being fingered and have them still intact for the next exhibition or not?

What direction do you see your work taking in the coming years?
More drawings, paintings, books, comics, hard and soft sculptures.

Do you have any creative ambitions?
To make progressively larger black an white ink drawings and larger paintings.

Further reading:
www.pipifax.ch
www.buenavenuturapress.com
www.adambaumgallery.com

Peepshow are a 10 strong collective of illustrators, designers and animators. Their members are Luke Best, Jenny Bowers, Miles Donovan, Chrissie MacDonald, Pete Mellor, Marie O’Connor, Andrew Rae, Eliot Thoburn, Lucy Vigrass and Spencer Wilson. Their early moving-image work attracted the attention of KesselsKramer and secured their first collaborative commission for the Italian fashion company Diesel. Other clients include Channel 4, The Guardian and Perrier. The first Peepshow Quarterly was launched in Autumn 2007 as a limited edition of 500 copies.

How did you choose the name Peepshow and when did it all start?
It started in 2000 with seven of us creating a website to showcase our individual work. The website was based on a peephole, showing a glimpse of our illustration portfolios and so the name Peepshow seemed perfect.
The website was simply a way for us to show our work together, at that time we weren’t aiming to create a collective but we slowly started working together. Our first exhibition was a collection of work shown within one space, then it continued to develop in an organic way and over time clients started to contact us. In 2004 we moved into a studio together and received our first big animation commission, as a collective.

If you had to describe Peepshow in one sentence?
The strength of 10 brains, twenty eyes and one hundred fingers.

Can you talk briefly about your background and training?
We all studied illustration, most of us at Brighton University. Illustration and animation is at the core of our training and that is reflected in the work we produce.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of working within a collective?
When one of us has a meeting we always take everyone’s work with us to show – so we help raise each other’s profile! If we are struggling we have each other for advice, we share all costs and by collaborating we end up working on projects that challenge us and take us out of our comfort zone. It is also lovely to come to a nice studio to work together! The disadvantages are contrasting opinions and balancing the amount of work. We all have our own individual commissions as well as the Peepshow work, so although we try to integrate them it can be difficult to balance both.

Do you think commissioning a collective is more appealing for clients?
Clients can get a great deal by coming to a collective as they have numerous creatives to work for them instead of one. The final outcome is less predictable when you commission a collective as there is not one set individual style to show. However, clients trust in us that the outcome will be right.

How does a collaboration affect the ownership rights and credits?
If more than one member of Peepshow are working on a commission then it is a Peepshow credit. Sometimes projects will come in that only requires one person in which case that individual is credited. Peepshow owns the rights for all our joint work.

How do you see the role of collectives in the illustration industry?
Working within a collective allows more creative freedom than working alone, it also encourages you to create more of the work you want to do and to take more of an art direction role. The client will come to a collective with a project and not have a clear idea of what the outcome will be, whereas with a solo illustrator you don’t tend to have a say, you just have to fulfil a brief. Clients tend to put their trust in a collective like they would with a design company.

Can you name some image-makers, past or present that interest or inspire you?
As a collective we are inspired by each other. Margaret Huber was a great tutor at Brighton and than after college we spent a year assisting Graham Rawle on his Expo 200 exhibition. It was during this time that we realised we liked working together as a group. It made us feel excited about future possibilities, so Graham is a huge inspiration for us.

How do you ensure that commissions are fairly distributed between your ten members?
There has never been a disagreement over who works on which project and it seems to even out really well. It is very natural as we all have different styles so the person’s style that suits that particular project does the work.
Certain individual styles fit together better within the collective – so that tends to decide who collaborates with who, but it changes for each project. No one steps on anyone else’s toes.

What are your creative ambitions?
To be more involved in projects at an earlier stage, shape ideas and have more creative freedom. The Saatchi windows we worked on last year were great and we have just made our first live action music video so it would be wonderful to do more of those.

Do you have any advice for collectives who are starting out?
There are many collectives starting out who don’t always have a clear idea of what they want to achieve and that’s a problem. Peepshow came together very naturally, to support each other, and we worked hard for years to establish our styles and be confident with our individual identities. Those strong roots are important for a successful collective. People tend to forget about the business side of a collective. Peepshow is a company. It takes time to learn how to deal with clients and a brief – it can’t be rushed. So our advice is don’t try too hard, it has to evolve organically.

Futher reading:
www.peepshow.org.uk