Thriving.

It’s a strange thing, timing. It creates connections between things that you don’t see coming.

It’s a strange thing, timing. It creates connections between things that you don’t see coming. 24 hours apart last week, a long-term friend died at the barely-halfway age of 49, while my illustrations for the Stylist’s article on female longevity, starring 70+ year-old model Lina, hit the shelves.

When I made these ‘tattoos’ in the studio, Leigh and I had known for a long time that our friend the poet Andrea Gibson would not recover from their illness. But as I sketched away on this lady of extraordinary grace and poise, I didn’t know those two things would become intertwined in an interesting way, creating a picture of two lives well-lived: one short but epic career (Andrea) and a long series of much shorter ones (Lina).

For the big cover close-up (changed at the last minute -‘Do Grow Up’ was moved inside) I isolated the original ‘Thriving’ neck tattoo from the skin and reworked it into a horizontal vector format, which was given extra realism by my colleague Lisa who took the lettering and applied tints and texture magic to give it the oomph that would stand up to ‘a real tattooist’s’ scrutiny. The rest are exactly as they were applied.

This was an unusually hands-on job, travelling to the studio with a make-up bag and a sketchbook to draw the ‘tattoos’ on site. They were photographed as we went along and dropped straight into the cover for review. Lina was perfectly composed and professional throughout, considering she stood the whole time in just a bikini. All the way home, I was thinking of her and her interesting life, her quiet confidence and gentleness, and of my Mum and Dad, both just turned 80, and of Andrea, whose life on earth was coming to a close and whose work has woven in and out of mine for the last 17 years or so; a straightforward editorial commission turning into a surprise opportunity for reflection.

I will be writing about Andrea more, later on. But I put this story on Substack on the day the death of Ozzy Osbourne was announced (himself no stranger to inked skin), and side by side, but very quietly and with nowhere near as much fanfare, that of Liquid band member Eamon Downes, after five years living with a brain tumour (Andrea refused to say they’d been ‘battling’ their cancer). Downes wrote one of the most iconic rave tunes of the era, ‘Sweet Harmony’, one of those massively hooky ones with a big chonky sample that brings a sound from an outsider/underground scene into living rooms, daytime radio, school discos and tiny clubs in little towns everywhere. It is an extraordinarily successful record, and I’m not talking about chart positions. Talking about it with Leigh earlier today, we discussed how Liquid didn’t ‘have just that one hit’. They created a cultural item that triggered huge shifts in the evolution of dance music and then carried on rippling through it for 3 decades. It’s one of those things that, if it were an actual object, would be in the Design Museum for its influence, or if it was a movie, would be in the National Film Archive. But it’s neither of those things - it’s a raucous rave track from the early 90s, and as such, it’s doubtful it’ll ever been seen through the same cultural lens as Sabbath.

So we had a moment of sadness and reflection in the studio, briefly pondered each in our own way the fleeting nature of the human lifespan, then banged the tune on loud and cracked on with our day. Three deaths, one enlightening encounter with longevity, two pop stars, fake tattoos, real poetry; with a load of other life and family stuff that’s not making its way into this piece or anywhere else, it’s been an emotionally challenging couple of weeks. But those jagged beats and that stonking sample: they cheered me no end. Sweet Harmony indeed.


Picture credits:
Photography @sarahbrickphotography
Model Lina at @uglymodels
Tattoo artist @sarahjcoleman_inkymole
Digital artwork @lisa_sheehan_asillo3d
Art Director @jessica_lockett
Photography Director @tom_gormer
@stylistmagazine @barepsldn @bareps