The world through the eyes of Cotswold illustrator and graphic artist Tony Meeuwissen is a fantastical one. Candia McKormack pays him a visit and is once again enchanted by his wild imaginings
I can’t tell you how good it is to catch up with Tony Meeuwissen.
There are certain people you come across in life whom you immediately warm to; whom you adore as much for their personality and kindness as you do their work, and the Amberley-based graphic artist and illustrator is one such person.
Although I wasn’t aware of his name at the time, the first time I really noticed his work was the ‘Peace on Earth’ cover he produced for the Christmas 1981 issue of Radio Times. The intricacy of the work; the cheeky-faced bat carvings; the snow resting on the castings on the bell; the lichen growing on the stonework. The image is timeless, and as iconic as it was 41 years ago.
I last interviewed Tony in his home studio in 2016, and we’ve some catching up to do. He’s just had a retrospective of his back catalogue of design and illustration published – a sumptuous hardback tome which, as you’d expect, is exquisitely produced, from its well-considered layout to the understated typography and gloriously-rendered endpapers. It’s also bang up to date, finishing with a work-in-progress piece Tony’s producing for The Swiss National Co-ordination Centre for Crayfish; a brilliantly playful reimagining of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights triptych. As ever with his work, you’ll want to spend time poring over it to find the hidden fantastical creatures and visual puns. Genius.
We’re chatting in Tony’s lovely Cotswold-stone home in St Chloe, Amberley. There’s no electrical power as workmen are scaling telegraph poles outside his house doing essential work, but he’s unfazed, and I’m immediately offered a cup of tea by his wife, Marie: ‘It’ll take a little longer as we’ve no power,’ she smiles as we climb the stairs to the illustrator’s studio which is, thankfully, lit by November sunshine streaming through the window.
Tucked under my arm is my own – already much-loved and well-thumbed – copy of his book, The World of Tony Meeuwissen: A life in illustration and graphic art.
‘I must say, I’m very pleased with how it’s turned out,’ he says, as we leaf through the pages of the book – printed by Gomer Press, over the border in Wales. ‘I’m told the printers very much like my work and enjoyed printing the book, so that was good feedback.’
Working on the layout of the book was Tony’s graphic designer brother Alan Reinl, who went the extra mile in making sure everything was just as it should be.
‘I was able to ask him to do things I wouldn’t have asked another graphic designer to do,’ he says. An example are the CS Lewis book covers produced for Fontana in the 1970s which Tony says he didn’t necessarily see as being a ‘set’, but with a tweak to the typography and a little light tidying up, they work beautifully together across the spread of pages 20-21 (I’ve included page references here, as you will undoubtedly feel compelled to get hold of a copy of the book for yourself).
Though you’d not know it, in most cases Tony didn’t have the benefit of the originals, and many of the pieces from the last 50-odd years were only available as tear sheets and printers’ proofs – in need of digital enhancement to make them publishable – so great care has been put into making this book as beautiful as it possibly can be.
‘Although I complain about the internet and such,’ he says, ‘this book would never have happened without today’s technology.’
Yes, Tony is resolutely analogue, and continues to produce his beautiful pieces using only pen and ink, scissors, gouache and watercolour. He’s certainly grateful for technology in other people’s hands, though – for example, he rates Patrick at Cheltenham’s Prom Print very highly for his help producing this book (shout-out to Patrick!) – but the likes of Photoshop, Illustrator and the like are not for him.
The World of Tony Meeuwissen is arranged in categories – magazine illustration; book jackets; music ephemera; simulacra; matchboxes; Royal mail, etc – rather than in chronological order, which works rather well.
‘Once I’d decided on the categories, I asked my friend Howard Brown – the Royal Mail used to refer to him as ‘Golden Brown’ as he produced so many sets of stamps,’ he says as a cheeky aside, ‘if he could design a book for me, or at least finely tune it. He wasn’t able to do the whole design, but what he did was to set the style for my stamp design pages – a grey tint background – which we then used as a template for other areas of the book.'
Another job for Tony’s brother was cleaning up all the perforations on the stamps, which the Royal Mail initially said they’d rather were left as they were. Once Tony had explained that the imperfections would be magnified by four times once reproduced in the book, though, they soon understood his reasoning. It was important to him that the whole book retained a clean look, and that has most definitely been achieved.
Tony started working on the book about three years ago.
‘I think I spent about nine months initially doing a dummy,’ he says. ‘My agent came to see me twice as he was so keen to do this. He said, “I know it’ll cost a lot of money, but put everything else aside and concentrate on this.” I thought it would only take about three months... but is was nine months on when he was about to take it round to the publishers, and then Covid struck.’
The real ‘everything else’ that Tony put aside to get The World of Tony Meeuwissen to print – and the elephant in the room – was his long-term book project The Purple Emperor, which Tony describes as ‘a millstone round my neck for more years than I am prepared to admit’.
‘I was so excited in the beginning,’ he says, ‘but I found the drawings so difficult to do...’
I sense that it’s time to move on from his bête noire, so we change tack, but the images that have been produced so far are so very beautiful – so cleverly imagined and executed – that it’s difficult to turn your back on. If you can’t imagine what an assassin bug, trapdoor spider, water boatman, shieldbug, pondskater, praying mantis or jellyfish look like in the mind of Tony Meeuwissen, turn to pages 134 to 145 of the book... which, by now, you’ve almost definitely ordered.
There are certain tropes that appear in Tony’s work, such as eggs (he used to paint on the surface of eggs many moons ago, and found the surface rather pleasing to work on, rather like watercolour paper); matchbox labels (which, together with cheese labels and cigarette cards, he had quite a collection of as a boy: ‘I lost them, though, as I started playing ‘cigarette cards’ at school and I wasn't very good at it’); and – most marvellously Meeuwissen of all – simulacra (the dictionary definition being ‘An unreal resemblance to something, without having its proper qualities’). Fertile ground for an imagination such as his.
A deformed tree trunk – possibly strangled by ivy – becomes an entwined snake; a tree stump with bracket fungi and resting moth takes on the shape of an owl; a cat’s eyes reflected in a goldfish bowl becomes the Four of Diamonds; and the wailing mouth of a girl caught between railings become the seventh spade of a Seven of Spades playing card. His is a world where you should never take things at face value.
Between 1970 and 1977, Tony says that he designed around 30 Penguin book jackets, with one of his favourites being Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar, with its pastiche of Wild Woodbine Cigarettes. ‘Everything about the design just fell into place,’ he says. ‘Its relevance to the storyline, the similar shape of book and packet, the then popular interest in ephemera of an earlier era, and the graphic potential of enlarging such a strong design.’
Tony states that, in the 1970s, Penguin Books paid just £40 for a jacket design – to include artwork for the front and back, plus the cost of typesetting. Not exactly a king’s ransom, but nevertheless he was keen to make sure the job was done as thoroughly as possible and to the best of his ability. He would read every single manuscript offered cover to cover, and often use some of the least obvious references as inspiration for his designs.
‘What did surprise me at the time,’ he says, ‘is that only once did an author want to change anything I had done. That author was Vladimir Nabokov, who ended up using one of his own drawings of butterflies instead; he was a great collector of butterflies.’
So, what possible objection could the author of Lolita have to Tony Meeuwissen’s work?
‘I think I did a slightly erotic thing of a phallic-looking caterpillar climbing up to an orchid that looked rather vaginal, if you know what I mean. Apart from that, everyone else just accepted totally,’ he says with a shrug.
Tony Meewissen is an incredibly warm-hearted man, filled with gratitude for the opportunities life has offered him, and for the good fortune of being able to work with some fine individuals. One such is a certain Mr Hormozi – former owner of an Iranian advertising agency – who commissioned Tony in 1980 to illustrate his messages of positive values. Using the brief ‘Give a helping hand’, the resulting piece depicts a tortoise trapped on its back, trying to eat the shadow of an out-of-reach strawberry. A powerful image that uses the often heartless world of advertising to offer succour and hope.
We come back to the work currently on his drawing board; his crayfish-inspired reimagining of Bosch’s famous triptych, which looks to be another Meeuwissen triumph.
‘This is probably the most complicated piece I’ve ever done,’ he says, looking at the initial sketches, source material, scaled-up photocopies and reworkings.
‘My client is so agreeable, he likes all my imaginative additions, so I have quite a free hand in it... so long as I follow the brief and include the ‘bad’ crayfish – the spiny-cheeked, signal, and red swamp crayfish – and the ‘good’ crayfish: the noble crayfish (which has almost had it), the stone crayfish, and the white-clawed crayfish.
‘I’ll do the finished work on some nice board,’ he concludes, ‘and I'm just about ready to do that.’
In the book (page 156), alongside Tony’s crayfish homage to the work by the Early Netherlandish painter, he includes a quote of Bosch’s from 1505 that our 21st-century artist is rather fond of: ‘For poor is the mind that always uses the ideas of others and invents none of its own’.
Rather apt, I think.
The World of Tony Meeuwissen: A life in illustration and graphic art is published by Nicholas Dawe, at £29 (ISBN: 9781913645199). Available from The Yellow Lighted Bookshops in Tetbury and Nailsworth and other good independent book sellers.
*Signed copies of Tony's book are available from Gallery 9, The Green, Northleach, GL54 3EX, which is staging a special exhibition in celebration of his work, from February 25-March 18, 2023. gallery9.co.uk
