The author, collage artist and designer Graham Rawle, who has died aged 69, of complications related to cancer treatment, once said: “As a kid I was always writing stories, making scrapbooks and magazines, building collections (bubble-gum cards, toy soldiers etc), making up jokes, drawing pictures. None of this seemed like work to me – it’s quite funny that this is now called ‘my career’.”
Graham gained public recognition for his collage series Lost Consonants, which first appeared in the Guardian in 1990. Readers were welcomed to a world where children have “leaning difficulties”, firemen wear “fame-resistant clothing” and footballers “get camp in their legs”. The series turned out to have greater longevity than Graham had imagined: “I initially submitted six. As I had lots more ideas and no one at the Guardian told me to stop, I just kept sending them in. There was no real agreement between us, but they always printed them, and I always got paid. I sent them in for the next 15 years.”
Later series included Lying Doggo and Graham Rawle’s Wonder Quiz for the Observer, When Words Collide and Pardon Mrs Arden for the Sunday Telegraph and Bright Ideas for the Times.
He published eight Lost Consonants compilations followed by a puzzle and games compendium, The Wonder Book of Fun (1993). His first narrative work, Diary of an Amateur Photographer (1998), was a murder mystery using his mastery of collage to give readers visual clues – and providing the solution in a sealed envelope inside the back cover of the book. His friend Roger Ebert, the film critic, called it “sneaky and funny” while Martin Rowson in the Independent on Sunday said it was “beautifully produced … both ingenious and deeply weird”.
Graham was born in Birmingham, the son of Denis Rawle, an electrical engineer, and his wife, Jessie (nee Fletcher). He was educated at High Storrs grammar school, Sheffield, and studied graphic art and design at Preston Polytechnic (now the University of Central Lancashire). A consummate guitarist, he toured the US with a Beatles cover band, learning every bass line so precisely that he even included Paul McCartney’s occasional mistakes.
He paused his musical career to set up his own graphics studio in London, designing book jackets, advertisements and theatre posters, notably for Kenneth Branagh’s 1986 production of Romeo and Juliet at the Lyric Hammersmith.
In 1988, he met Margaret Huber, an artist and teacher at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, when she visited London to assist in the curation of Unusually Good Haircuts, the college’s exhibition of British illustrators. Graham was invited to exhibit and travelled to Minneapolis, returning to the college as artist in residence the following year.
He and Margaret married in 1991 and settled in east London, where their home/studio was a warehouse decorated with shop cabinets and mannequins, car-boot finds, toys and guitars. To visit was to enter another world – not unlike some of Graham’s magical creations – where, alongside hard work, generosity, laughter and happiness ruled.
In 1999 Graham headed the team of artists that designed the vast Hi-Life Supermarket installation for Expo 2000, a world’s fair staged in Hanover, Germany. The post-apocalyptic artwork was designed to illustrate the consequences of excessive consumerism.
Expanding on these themes, back in London Graham assembled a group of artists under the name the Niff Institute, to create a range of limited edition art pieces such as The Non-Specific Tape Measure which accurately evaluated such measurements as “knee high”, “spitting distance” and “too close for comfort”.
It was around this time that Graham began work on his most ambitious project – a collaged novel, Woman’s World (2005), created from 40,000 fragments of text clipped from vintage women’s magazines – a labour-intensive process that took him more than five years.
He began writing the novel while gathering clippings he thought might be useful. “I transcribed all this stuff to form a kind of phrase bank that could be word-searched, each typed piece carrying with it a volume and page number to identify where the text piece originated. Gradually I replaced all my original manuscript with the found text … now the new words carried with them the voice of the original women’s magazines and I was finally able to paste up the story as artwork.” The Times review described it as “a work of genius”.
In 2008 he published a reinterpretation of The Wizard of Oz, illustrating L Frank Baum’s original text with more than 100 images created using collage, photography and model-making. It won Book of the Year and the Illustrated Book award at the British Book Design and Production awards.
His final novel, Overland (2018), tells the true story of a 1942 US Army commission to fabricate an entire town on top of the Lockheed aircraft-manufacturing plant in California as camouflage against Japanese aerial attack. In real life, Hollywood art directors created a perfect, seemingly inhabited suburban town; Graham’s twist was to have his fictional characters actually inhabit it. The themes of the text are reflected in the layout – he placed parallel pages one above the other so that the stories of the utopian Overland and the dark industrial underworld are read together.
From 2000 onwards Graham taught an MA course in sequential design and illustration at the University of Brighton and was regularly invited to lecture internationally. He was a visiting professor of illustration at both Falmouth School of Art in Cornwall and Norwich University of the Arts, and at the latter was awarded an honorary doctorate.
His last project was to be a fully collaged film adaptation of Woman’s World made entirely of clippings from British films of the 1940s, 50s and 60s. Ten minutes of footage exists and Graham hoped that other artists would take up the challenge of completing the film.
He is survived by Margaret and by his brother, the actor Jeff Rawle.
• Graham Rawle, artist and writer, born 22 July 1955; died 16 August 2024
