by Author, collage artist and designer Graham Rawle, who died aged 69 from complications related to cancer treatment, once said: “As a child I was always writing stories, making scrapbooks and journals, building collections (chewing gum cards, toy soldiers etc.), making up jokes and drawing pictures. None of this felt like work to me – it’s quite funny that this is now called ‘my career’.”
Graham gained public recognition for his collage series “Lost Consonants”, which first appeared in the Guardian in 1990. Readers were transported to a world where children have “learning difficulties”, firemen wear “fame-resistant clothing” and footballers have “fluffiness in their legs”. The series proved more enduring than Graham had imagined: “I submitted six initially. As I had many more ideas and nobody at the Guardian told me to stop, I just kept sending them in. There was no real agreement between us, but they always printed them and I always got paid. I sent them in for the next 15 years.”
Later series included ‘Lying Doggo’ and ‘Graham Rawle’s Wonder Quiz’ for the Observer, ‘When Words Collide’ and ‘Pardon Mrs Arden’ for the Sunday Telegraph, and ‘Bright Ideas’ for the Times.
He published eight Lost Consonants collections, followed by a compendium of puzzles and games, The Wonder Book of Fun (1993). His first narrative work, Diary of an Amateur Photographer (1998), was a crime thriller in which he used his mastery of collage to give readers visual clues – and provided the solution in a sealed envelope at the back of the book. His friend Roger Ebert, the film critic, called it “sly and funny”, while Martin Rowson in the Independent on Sunday said it was “beautifully produced … both ingenious and profoundly strange”.
Graham was born in Birmingham to electrical engineer Denis Rawle and his wife Jessie (née Fletcher). He attended High Storrs Grammar School in Sheffield and studied graphic arts and design at Preston Polytechnic (now the University of Central Lancashire). An accomplished guitarist, he toured the US with a Beatles cover band, learning every bass line so well that he even included Paul McCartney’s occasional mistakes.
He interrupted his musical career to open his own graphic design studio in London, designing book covers, advertisements and theatre posters, notably for Kenneth Branagh’s 1986 production of Romeo and Juliet at the Lyric Hammersmith.
In 1988, he met Margaret Huber, an artist and teacher at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, when she visited London to help curate Unusually Good Haircuts, the college’s exhibition of British illustrators. Graham was invited to exhibit there and traveled to Minneapolis, returning to the college the following year as artist in residence.
He and Margaret married in 1991 and settled in east London, where their home/studio was a warehouse furnished with shop windows and mannequins, car boot finds, toys and guitars. Visiting there was like entering another world – not unlike some of Graham’s magical creations – where generosity, laughter and happiness reigned alongside hard work.
In 1999, Graham led the team of artists who designed the massive Hi-Life Supermarket installation for Expo 2000, a world fair in Hanover, Germany. The post-apocalyptic artwork was intended to illustrate the consequences of excessive consumption.
Back in London, to explore these themes further, Graham gathered a group of artists under the name “Niff Institute” to create a series of limited edition artworks, such as “The Non-Specific Tape Measure,” which precisely measured dimensions such as “knee-high,” “spitting distance,” and “too close for comfort.”
It was around this time that Graham began work on his most ambitious project: a collage novel called Woman’s World (2005), composed of 40,000 fragments of text cut from old women’s magazines. This labor-intensive process took more than five years.
He began writing the novel while collecting clippings he thought would be useful. “I transcribed all of this to create a kind of phrase bank in which one could search for words. Each typed piece was given a volume and page number to identify where the text came from. Little by little I replaced all my original manuscript with the found text…now the new words carried the voice of the original women’s magazines and I could finally paste the story up as a work of art.” The Times review described it as “a work of genius.”
In 2008 he published a new interpretation of The Wizard of Oz, illustrating the original text by L. Frank Baum with over 100 images he created using collage, photography and model making. The book won Book of the Year and Illustrated Book at the British Book Design and Production Awards.
His last novel, Overland (2018), tells the true story of a 1942 US Army contract to build an entire city on the roof of the Lockheed aircraft factory in California as a cover against Japanese air raids. In real life, Hollywood’s art directors created a perfect, seemingly inhabited suburban city; Graham’s trick was to make his fictional characters actually live in it. The themes of the text are reflected in the layout – he placed parallel pages on top of each other so that the stories of the utopian Overland and the dark industrial underworld are read together.
From 2000, Graham taught an MA course in Sequential Design and Illustration at the University of Brighton and was regularly invited to lecture internationally. He was Visiting Professor of Illustration at both the Falmouth School of Art in Cornwall and Norwich University of the Arts, receiving an Honorary Doctorate from the latter.
His final project was to be an entirely collage adaptation of Woman’s World, made entirely from clips from British films of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. There are ten minutes of footage and Graham hoped that other artists would take up the challenge of completing the film.
He leaves behind Margaret and his brother, actor Jeff Rawle.
• Graham Rawle, artist and writer, born July 22, 1955; died August 16, 2024
