Published in Wallpaper* November 2008
Alan Aldridge is so LA. It’s taken a while for him to become so LA – answering the door to his La Brea Park apartment in bare feet, hair dyed black and slicked back, stereo playing music that would fit just as well in a raucous yoga class as in this spare art-decorated space – but he made it. It’s taken a few career shifts, a few absurd stories, and one self-described Machiavellian move, but Aldridge is settled in this fair city of angels. And, after years as a Hollywood screenwriter, Aldridge is back to his art.
Aldridge designed this month’s magazine cover and, when we speak a bright August afternoon, is about to start designing the word “Wallpaper.” He doesn’t really have a plan for how it’ll go – “when it’s right it just hits” – and he’s not really worried about having to get ready for a big retrospective of his work slated to open this October at the Design Museum London –“it’s not a problem.” Mostly, right now, he wants to tell the story of how he got here.
It’s a story worth telling. Born in East London, Aldridge dropped out of school at 14 after coming in absolutely last in his class, receiving a score of 3/100 for an exam. “It would have been four if you’d spelled your name right,” he remembers the teacher telling him. So Aldridge left, worked on the Canary Wharf docks, plucked chickens, and then traveled by train to Paris in order to, in a very Orwellian move, work as a plongeur at a ritzy hotel. It was then and there that he started drawing.
He liked his portraits so much that he brought them back to London in a suitcase and tried to sell them to a few galleries. They turned him down – a rejection that, so many years later, still seems to stick as he refers to fine artists as dilettantes – but he kept on trying to get into the art world. So hard that when a friend of his was complaining about having to go in for a job interview, he offered to take her place. In a well-practiced story, Aldridge explains how he went in, affirmed the interviewer’s unintelligible questions like “Is this key line?” and got the job. A colleague immediately figured out the scam, but covered for him, all the while teaching Aldridge how to do what he was supposed to already know. Why? “I was very pretty in those days.”
Various excitements led to his getting fired; in his spare time, Aldridge started taking a graphic design class and met Germano Fachetti, then working as art director at Penguin. Aldridge won a contest and designed a cover for the publisher, and kept designing more. Eventually he was brought in-house. And then, eventually, in what became his Machiavellian move, he took his mentor’s position. He started drawing for the Beatles, who asked him to work on their visual identity. Their psychedelic music and his dark sense of whimsically creepy detail were a perfect fit, and he came up with the idea to do an illustrated book of all of their songs. It became, in another stroke of by this point typical Aldridge luck, a flagship book for the nascent British Print Corporation and was published to massive acclaim in 1969. Aldridge left Penguin and started Ink Inc, named mostly for the repeated pun.
By 1971, the artist was burned out. So he sold Ink, stopped drawing, bought a house in the English countryside, did a children’s book called The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast -- a trippy tour through a buggy world -- and generally recalibrated until Elton John asked him to design a cover for his Captain Fantastic album. Aldridge liked that name so much he thought he’d write up a film scenario based on the character, and that’s how he came to be tanned and healthy in that LA way, living in the center of this California city. He spent years writing movie treatments complete with Aldridge-ian characters. And he hasn’t stopped drawing since.
This month’s cover has Aldridge’s immersive sense of freakishly detailed color, and it’s punchy. It’s sparer than much of the work hanging on the walls of his studio and expected for the Design Museum show, called Alan Aldridge: The Man with Kaleidoscope Eyes, but it completely fits his outsider aesthetic, this mix of influences from the sheer luck to meet the supporters he did to the raw talent he first discovered during his down and out dishwashing career. The cover might be unexpected, but that visual language is such a part of the identity of the second half of the twentieth century that it’s often hard to forget that images like these sprang from one man’s imagination, and one man’s desk. But Aldridge isn’t just one artist working with one medium; he’s someone who perfectly played and fit into the cultural and visual history of the twentieth century, and whose look is still current today.
