Falmouth unleashes the Untamed Tiger: an open forum about the illustrator’s self-initiated project

An exciting line up of eight leading creative author-illustrator-designers of international repute took to the stage at University College Falmouth's Open Forum this month to share their expertise on the subject of independently-minded and enterprising illustrators.

Organised annually by UCF's MA in Illustration: Authorial Practice. The Open Forum took place at the Woodlane Campus in Falmouth.

The event was chaired by Amelia Johnstone with main speakers, Jonathon Rosen, Bill Bragg, Graham Rawle, Matthew Richardson and additional guests, Anna Bhushan, Andrew Foster and David Kerr.

Through a day of presentations and discussion, attendees had the opportunity to explore enterprising initiatives and new autonomies in illustration including special consideration of those illustrators who generate their own projects, create their own employment and work on their own terms.

Amelia Johnstone has exhibited in London in both solo and group shows and around the world. She is currently working on a book about two jealous sisters named Orange and Lemon‚ who have a tendency to let heads roll: 'here comes the chopper to chop off your head'. She has recently begun to research and make images for a new version of Hansel and Gretel with an Angela Carter twist. She currently lectures on BA(Hons) Illustration at Cardiff's School of Art & Design.

Jonathon Rosen is based in Brooklyn and makes static and moving pictures, books, drawings, paintings and animation, and employs his self confessed, ongoing obsession with the medical, mechanical and carnivalesque. Commissions include work for Sony, New Scientist, the New York Times' Sunday Magazine, Warner Bros. Records, MTV and Time Magazine. Jonathon's work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Art Museum New York, the Brooklyn Art Museum, Si Newhouse, Danny Devito, Smog Design, Zoom Design, Tim Burton, David Cronenberg, amongst others. His film/ animation/TV clients include: Le Dernier Cri, Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow: Ichabod Crane's journal drawings and design, Tales from the crypt (Inscape), and MTV.

Bill Bragg has been working as a freelance illustrator since 1998. This, combined with a long-term love affair with graphic novels led him to the Royal College of Art where he spent two years experimenting with the form as well as co founding, LE GUN magazine, now an established art annual. Bill has produced worked for a broad range of newspapers in the UK and the US including a comic strip for Icon magazine and is currently working on a longer work with writer, James Caddick. Bill Bragg was shortlisted for the 2010 Arts Foundation Graphic Novel Fellowship.

Graham Rawle is a UK writer and collage artist whose visual work incorporates illustration, design, photography and installation. His weekly Lost Consonants series appeared in the Weekend Guardian for 15 years. He has produced other regular series for the Observer and the Sunday Telegraph Magazine with his latest, Bright Ideas, appearing weekly in the Times' Saturday Review. His critically acclaimed Woman's World is being made into a feature film whilst his The Wizard of Oz, published in 2008, won Book of the Year at the 2009 British Book Design and Production Awards. He currently lectures on MA Sequential Design & Illustration at the University of Brighton.

Matthew Richardson has worked for many clients including the London Sinfonietta, Channel 4 Television, Penguin Books, the British Council, the Guardian, the Times, Decca and HMV Music. Matthew also exhibits his own work utilising print, photography, animation, assemblage and digital media. Currently this work explores and is informed by ideas and myths about social belief, originality and authenticity. In 2007, Matthew received the Association of Illustrators' Unpublished Silver award for Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson. This followed a Gold and Bronze award from the Association of Illustrators for In Evil Hour and Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in 2006 and 2005 respectively.

Anna Bhushan graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2004 and has since divided her time between London and New York. She works in watercolour and gouache to create illustrations and paintings for commissioned assignments and exhibitions whilst also teaching Illustration on a number of BA(Hons) and MA courses. In 2004, she won 1st Prize in the Quentin Blake Illustration Prize for Narrative Illustration and has produced work for the New York Times, Levis, the Guardian and the Independent amongst many others.

Andrew Foster is currently Illustration subject leader for MA Communication Design at Central St Martins School of Art and Design in London. His practice includes personal work, commissioned pieces and teaching.

David Kerr graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2006. From his home city of Glasgow he works with graphite, charcoal, Indian ink and gouache, and uses a wacom tablet to create illustrations and paintings for commissioned assignments and self-motivated projects.

"MA Illustration: Authorial Practice at University College Falmouth encourages illustrators to develop their own personal voice and to develop their own ideas and concepts," explains Course Leader, Steve Braund.  "The aim of this year's Forum was to debate further the exact nature of independence and enterprise within authorial illustration, and we are delighted to have been able to welcome such high calibre speakers with personal expertise that is so relevant to this event," he adds.

"It was definitely one of those life changing experiences," Jonathon Rosen enthused, cementing his belief that what MA Illustration: Authorial Practice offers "is really important in redefining and re-validating illustration as a profession."

MA Illustration: Authorial Practice has already produced rising stars such as Christopher Crump (illustrator of bestselling book, The Valley of Secrets), Viviane Schwarz (Walker Books author/illustrator), Barnaby Richards (author/illustrator whose work regularly appears in the Guardian) and Chris Stonehill, whose illustrations were commissioned by Boots the Chemist for an advertising campaign. Tem Doran also won one of the five awards at the E3 film competition Languages Through Lenses, organised by ELIA (The European League of Institutes of the Arts) for his work called Smile.

Course Leader, Steve Braund, is both a successful practising illustrator and director of Atlantic Press Ltd, an innovative publishing initiative that aims to help illustrators explore and develop their authorial voices.

For further information about MA Illustration: Authorial Practice at University College Falmouth, please visit www.falmouth.ac.uk/authorialillustration, email admissions@falmouth.ac.uk or telephone Admissions on 01326 214372 (for the full-time option) or 01326 214373 (for the part-time route).

University College Falmouth is the only independent Higher Education institution in Cornwall with the powers to award degrees in its own name. It has two campuses in Cornwall - at Woodlane in Falmouth and Tremough in Penryn (which it owns, and jointly manages with the University of Exeter) - and a third campus at Totnes in Devon, following its merger with Dartington College of Arts in 2008.

This merger created a new institution focusing on the expansion of Falmouth's expertise in Art, Design and Media and Dartington's expertise in Choreography, Music, Theatre, Art and Writing. The Devon-based courses will relocate to a new, high-specification Performance Centre at Tremough in 2010, paving the way for a new specialist Arts University in Cornwall by 2013/2014 that will be unique to the South West.

The University College is a founding partner in the Combined Universities in Cornwall (CUC), a unique initiative to promote regional economic regeneration through Higher Education, funded mainly by the European Union (Objective One and Convergence), the South West Regional Development Agency, and the Higher Education Funding Council for England, with support from Cornwall Council.

Ends

For further information about University College Falmouth, please contact Jilly Easterby Dip CIPR MCIPR, Head of Public Affairs, Telephone: 01326 213792, or email:  jilly.easterby@falmouth.ac.uk

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