Angus Hyland in conversation with our Founder, Gyr King

G: Angus, good morning.

A: Good morning.

G: Angus, you’ve been a designer for the best part of 40 years, creating designs for many of the world’s most famous brands and businesses, writing books on design, teaching, and more recently painting and creating your own art. I’m interested in the motivation for this. Is it to get a release from the constraints of working to a brief or do you see it as just simply a natural progression?

A: It came around for a number of reasons. Primarily I was getting further and further away from the work we do here, the commercial work, because I have a team that I work with. So I've become more of a creative director than a practicing designer.

I mean, my software skills are next to none, right? So I work through collaboration, not just with clients, but also with the creative team. So at some point, I just got this itch to actually take all of those elements away, just do something that required only me to actually output it. So my idea, my execution, my thing, and that’s how the painting started, as something to get me back into kind of art college thinking, if you like.

G: I was thinking that was the sort of answer you might give, but I wanted to bring it back to graphic design a little bit. Somewhere you wrote about the Playboy Bunny symbol as being something that was designed in the 50s that actually is still a very recognisable, very successful symbol that still makes money, when the business it’s attached to is in decline.

Do you recognise symbols as having a life of their own that end up representing something else? And how does that work when it gets juxtaposed to art for example, like Andy Warhol who was using corporate symbols, actually putting the mainstream into art?

A: Okay, that’s a few things to unpack there. First of all, I’d say my painting deliberately avoids doing what we’d deem to be called Pop Art, which is using iconography that’s familiar to us in the commercial world. And usually when graphic designers do art, as it were, they tend to lean towards either kind of a variant to Pop Art, or they’ll fixate on typography, because that’s one of the key tools that we use.

And I thought, if I go in that direction then I need to start to think about it in terms of content. You know, what do you write? If it’s words, or if you’re using a kind of Pop iconography, why are you putting this into the paint? What’s the purpose of it?

I went right back into one of the key components of graphic design, which is composition. So I thought, I’m just going to strip everything out apart from colour and composition, and focus in an almost Bauhaus way on the kind of fundamental elements, and then build from there.

So that’s how the paintings came about. In terms of the symbols; symbols have strange lives, (maybe potentially logos, symbols, trademarks) they’re one of the outputs of graphic design that may have longevity, most of what graphic design/commercial art does is ephemeral.

Whether it’s print or digital, it serves a purpose of communicating something at a point in time. Whereas a symbol, because it represents the cherry on the cake of an organisation, or if you like their flag, it has the possibility of having a longer lifespan than a lot of ephemeral graphic art. So symbols, because they hang around, quite often lose their original meaning, they adopt new meanings, and that makes them kind of interesting as cultural objects, but also as objects that can be manipulated and used as content for art.

G: You’ve been talking about symbols in art, and actually that’s really interesting, because that describes a lot of what Pop Art was. Going back to Warhol, who was a trained graphic designer when he started to use recognised symbols, he’d mainly been described as putting the image back into art because it followed a very prolonged period of Abstract Art being produced.

And in a sense now, we’ve had a very prolonged period of art which has really been more conceptual, and we’re going through a period where if you say you’re an artist, you are an artist. And lots and lots of artists, virtually, that’s their own credential, is that they’re identifying themselves as artists.

So I was wondering whether because graphic design by its nature is demanding of a technique, is there an option or a possibility that graphic design today might also be the saviour of the situation – as we seem to be going down a dead end at the moment with art, whether or not that will rejuvenate the use of technique or the use of something a bit more concrete than just conceptual and abstract.

A: Yeah, I think given that everything is so much in the digital realm, and with NFT’s being tokens of authenticity, we’re so bombarded. I mean, the world is so much more of a visual culture than it was 50 years ago, because of our constant bombardment of images through our phones, we’re much more visually sophisticated. And we know that this will continue to generate more and more with AI – we won’t know what is real and what isn’t real when we look at a photograph, because the face is so good, and they’re going to get better and better.

So the idea of authenticity, I think, may be a really key component to judging what is a good and bad piece of content or art form. So if you dial it back to literally paint on canvas, it’s probably actually a very obvious way of bringing authenticity back into the artistic process. So there’s an immediate artist and artwork relationship, and not through the mechanism of all the complexities of what we see now in the digital realm.