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A Scandinavian friend recently described London as “a wobbly place”. It’s thrilling until you want to put roots down, she explained, then you find yourself on shaky ground. I was reminded of this as I read My Town, David Gentleman’s pictorial memoir that illustrates both the unreliable underpinnings and the unbridled fun of life in Britain’s capital.
Published to coincide with his 90th birthday, the book takes readers on a journey through the streets of the city and a career that has encompassed public, political, commercial and personal projects. He has produced book illustrations, transport and museum posters, protest signs (including placards for the Stop the War Coalition) and more than 100 postal stamps for the Royal Mail. Perhaps his most famous design is a vast mural of medieval labourers, formed out of linked panels as in a devotional book of hours or a Manga comic, created for the Northern Line platforms at Charing Cross underground station.
He has also continually painted landscapes and figurative studies in watercolour, with much of the work focused on London. A survey of his designs, paintings and drawings is here interspersed with recollections from a life powered by the eye. The result is an often-surprising intersection of anecdote and observation which scrutinises a sprawling metropolis and art’s place within it.
It is a timely publication, arriving as the cost and curation of public artworks are being debated around the globe: in the US artists resorted to crowdfunding in 2018 to place political works on billboards, while in Paris critics recently dismissed government-backed pop art as “eye-candy for philistines”.
Born to two Scottish painters who relocated to the home counties before the second world war, Gentleman grew up as the Blitz lit up the horizon. Later, at the Royal College of Art, he learnt typography, wood engraving and lithography, all of which would impact his developing style, a fluid approach with a particular bent for historical and architectural motifs.
Postwar London, Gentleman notes, was still a largely Victorian landscape: grand, strange and optimistic. You could buy a monkey in the local pet shop and walk up to the door of No 10 Downing Street. Even as a jobbing illustrator he could afford to lease a coach house in Camden. But things were changing. In the RCA studios in South Kensington, Francis Bacon began his “screaming popes” supposedly painted with his bare forearm, while, over in the City, Wren’s churches were being dwarfed by towers of glass and steel. Gentleman finds beauty in all of it.
After graduation, he took marketing commissions but had “already begun to suspect that advertising was antisocial and parasitical”. He was happier designing paperback covers for the Penguin New Shakespeare series: “Knowing that they would be seen by a whole generation of impressionable school children spurred me on.”
For more than half a century, Gentleman has lived in a left-leaning pocket of Primrose Hill where his studio is bookended by a crescent of cars and a splay of silver birches. This alone can provide material for a day’s work. Drawing, he explains, is about looking; and good drawing requires the ability to notice what others ignore. Buskers, beggars and towpaths are all worth contemplation, he maintains.
He writes clearly about the tension between the hackneyed and the off-kilter, as well as balancing a fondness for the familiar with the excitement of an ever-changing canvas. As a painter he is a master of the muted palette — stagnant green canals, gunpowder skies — but as a writer he is vivid: the “sparkle and menace” of the Thames; “spidery cranes” looming over building sites.
He stands in a 20th-century tradition of cultural engagement with the cityscape. From the muralist movement of 1930s Mexico City to the socialist mosaics of cold war Berlin, the collective experience could be found on the walls.
Sadly, it is a custom that is disappearing. With his generous outlook, Gentleman emphasises that an artist can trace — and impact — the evolution of a city in a unique manner. In particular, he shows us that London might be a wobbly place, but it is still full of wonders.
My Town: An Artist’s Life in London, by David Gentleman, Particular Books, RRP£20, 288 pages
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