#slowboy

Mr. Slowboy’s art style, as well his sartorial interests, clearly demonstrate a debt to American and  Japanese Ivy, as can be seen from a quick look back at the iconic illustrations of  VAN Magazine:

We can see the same interest in texture and silhouette. The exaggerated arm-curve that keeps the hands from blocking the product is also echoed in some of the poses used by Mr. Slowboy. But the VAN  pictures are clearly product illustrations, not people: their faces are interchangeable and the mood blandly happy. They appear packed in grids but seemingly oblivious of one another; they are one-dimensional men. By contrast, Mr. Slowboy’s faces and figures are full of character. When he uses real people, we get a sense of their personality,  from Liverano’s avuncular charm to George Wang’s energetic cheer.

It is clear that, as a good advertiser must, Mr. Slowboy produces the kind of detailed product shots that a retailer needs, and the soft but crisp lines of his ink outlines certainly help. In some of the Dunhill campaign, too, you can see how his style has been adapted to render the bland, mindless rich-man happiness that big brands like to use for aspirational marketing, but it’s clear from his portfolio that this is a mood imposed on the artist by the client, and not the other way around. (The work for Drakes and The Armoury is, unsurprisingly, less corporate and richer in character.)

In his self-portraits (and in his self-deprecating pseudonym) what comes through is hesitancy, sometimes bordering on shyness. The apple pip eyes always look a little surprised in those big glasses. What separates his self-portraits from the characters he draws for paying clients is the note of vulnerability. In these pictures it is as if the central figure has only just spotted the viewer, and is caught in that moment of absolute possibility and flight that flickers between two strangers before they know how the other will respond.

There is also a broad range of humour in his work, from quiet wit to bright visual humour. His characters are people who are capable of making errors, and of laughing them off. It feels like their happiness is never unearned or forced for the camera. Models for menswear typically have the kind of blank, smouldering expression that is supposed to suggest attractiveness while avoiding risk of conveying actual attraction. They are captured in this way to close down the possibility of any emotional connection between viewer and model; to displace their personality onto the products. Mr. Slowboy’s pictures have none of this anxiety, and so enjoy a far greater tonal range. They are happy but also and pensive, relaxed but also curious. They seem like people who have hopes and regrets.

Mr. Slowboy draws a world in which clothing is part of life rather than an alternative to it. The VAN   images seem to have been constructed from a product grid, with each pre-cut face dropped onto a pile of clothes. Laurence Fellows’s famous  Apparel Arts   figures are celebrated for their sartorial detail and optimistic mood, but they almost all have either a bland stiff upper lip, or a fixed, mechanical smile that suggests the same relentless, dumb happiness of the VAN  outlines. (The only Fellows illustration I have seen with any tonal complexity is  this one  collected by  Sven Raphael Schneider, though I would like to be corrected if there are more.) By contrast, these are pictures that seem to begin with a person and a structure of feeling, on which Mr. Slowboy builds up layers of clothes, scenery and location. He can take these kinds of risk, I suspect, because his touch on the paper is so light, his technique precise, and the shading subtle but unfussy. (His is a caligrapher’s hand as well as a visual artist’s.) Above all, there is an uncommon level of social intelligence in this work. His illustrations are witty and complicated, his characters as detailed as their garments.

(Note the subtle nod here to Hergé, another palpable influence on the style and mood of these illustrations)

https://www.mrslowboy.com

https://www.thegentlemansjournal.com/article/six-life-lessons-from-porfirio-rubirosa-the-greatest-playboy-of-the-twentieth-century/

http://www.greyfoxblog.com/2017/06/interview-mr-slowboy-artist-how-to-live.html

See Also:

Japanese Ivy today

A Fine Balance