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Clients include:
MTV
E4 Music
London Transport
Feref Creative Agency
Perrier
Universal
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Paul Smith
Punk Agency
Mother Creative Agency
Jackass 2 The Movie
The Social
Pictoplasma
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Carhartt
Hove Festival, Norway
Barbican
Crib 5 Furniture Agency
Ogilvy |
Chapter 1: The Early
Years.
"Who is this Ian Stevenson?" you may well
be asking at this moment and that is a very interesting
question about a very interesting man, for he is a man
of all seasons, a man from that glowing cultural node
of all Greatest Britain, Leicestershire, English in
his Britishness and British in
his Leicestershirity but the question of who he is cannot
fully be fully answered fully before a different question
is asked and then subsequently answered about this man
first which is this one: how is this man? "Very
well, thank you" he may say but also how he is
is this: born in Paris on a summer's day, 1794, in the
midst of the French Revolution to a dashing young army
officer and his beautiful hairdresser bride, Ian's life
began in firey turmoil. Both parents were beheaded on
the guillotine by the Jacobins for counter-revolutionary
activities the moment Ian's bloodied, fragile, stupid
body dripped from the womb.
With haste, Ian made arrangements for his exile and
stowing himself in a cart laden with goats'
ears and bat crumbs, made for Germany. The journey from
Paris to Hamburg was long and arduous; many of the roads
had yet to be made and the cart driver, an elderly Italian
goat and bat merchant, was
a foolish drunkard who could not read a map and could
only speak an invented language of his own: a queer
garbling in which all the verbs were replaced hooking
phlegm at varying speed at the back of the throat (e.g.
very fast meaning "to run" and a medium pace
meaning "to saunter").
Ian arrived at his destination in the autumn of 1806,
sprang from the cart but as he went to thank the merchant
the old man coughing, spluttering, fell to the ground.
"HAHrsstkajeiejjje KKKKKKKKKTHHH! KKKKKKKK! pssshsshstutututuutu
QQQQOOOOOOK! QQOOOOOOK! FK FK fwwweeee" he managed
to stutter before dying of cramp. These words were to
be prophetic.
During the twelve years in the cart, Ian had for company
only the three volumes of Edward Gibbon's History of
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and some faded
pictures he had bought in Paris from a withered old
hag who claimed they were accurate engravings of rude
women. In fact they depicted elk feeding and Ian's confusion
between the two has been manifest ever since. In addition,
being (as he believed himelf to be) a Roman in 1806
Germany was not easy as the Holy Roman Empire collapsed
about his toga. He again forced himself into exile.
Ian comandeered a small pony and trekked his way to
Norway, where he had heard the elk run free.
Nineteeth Century Norway was a time of great fun and
games, wild parties and elk riding for Ian.
By the age of thirteen Ian was known as much for his
playboy lifestyle as for his work as a senior advisor
to the King. Ian pushed for Norwegian support of the
French in the Napoleonic wars (ironically, considering
Napoleon also enjoyed the support of the Jacobins, the
killers of his parents) and fought against the union
of Norway with Sweden. His position in local history
is set
in stone and his name is known to all Norwegian school
children, through the popular nursery rhyme "Ian,
Ian, What a Guy". That said, there are people living
in a small village 20 miles east of Oslo, many of whom
bear the surname Svenson and who can be said have a
slight elkishness about them. Ian's brilliance in this
period was offset by his indulgence.
Eventually Ian tired of reindeer meat and whaling and
in the 1920s returned to Germany, to experience the
extravagance of the Weimar Republic era Berlin. A whirlwind
of rudeness and naugtiness ensued. Ian was impressed
with the art and stuff but it was mainly the girls he
chased. However a severe bout of athelete's foot lasting
over forty years meant he never caught a single
one and spent all his money on peak rate calls to elk
chatlines.
After the war, Ian, known for his research into the
use of atomic power in bombs, was employed as
a senior adviser to the US Government and was viciously
lampooned as Dr Strangelove (an anagram of Stevenson)
in Stanley Kubrick's film. Nevertheless, his career
in US politics was long and high acheiving, Ian famously
having the honour of being the first man to set foot
on the moon in 1969.
Ian came to London in 1971 and meeting young ceramics
teacher Brian Ferry through an advert in the music press
became the producer of and senior adviser to the fledgling
Roxy Music. Ian recorded thier first, eponymous album
and their 1973 follow-up For Your Pleasure, before parting
ways with the group, though he did pose for the cover
of their later record Country Life. Other bands he produced
in the seventies include Cockney Rebel and Gary Glitter.
Ian spent the eighties thinking. In the ninties he emerged
with renewed vigour, a fully formed
human being. After a long and varied career, he decided
that the visual arts was his calling and
his future would be there.
Chapter 2: The Design
Years
Ian is a professional man, secure in his sexuality and
proud of his body. He attended Camberwell College of
Arts between 1996 and 9 where he learned to make things
look pretty on a variety of surfaces including paper
and fabric. Ah, the carefree days of studenthood; a
haze of substance abuse, late nights, later mornings
and free love - experiences which many of us are familiar,
as is Ian (minus the free love). These soon ended and
Ian placed himself on the free market, selling his skills
for cash to spend on drink, trinkets from charity shops
and free love. Hawking himself on a dirty alley named
graphic design, he was picked up in the slick limousine
of a famous company who, for no reason at all except
to add the illusion of foul play, will remain nameless,
where he stayed for three circles of the Earth's orbit
around our Sun (that firey, heartless life-giver), making
many good things there including videos for songs by
a band and little creatures and t-shirts and
so on and so forth.
Ian's ideas are crammed into his head like toys in a
popular middle-class boy's bedroom. Without money or
a single friend, Ian had nowhere upon which to deposit
many of the beautiful images that came to him. With
no canvases within his price range and all the major
galleries chasing him away with spears at the very suggestion
that they afford him wall space he had to look elsewhere.
Luckily, Ian's eyes are keener than a trucker's on special
trucker speed and with those soppy old big blues of
his he began to notice all over blank, cheerless surfaces,
gaping and desolate waiting to be filled: a discarded
fridge here, an abandoned gas fire there, rubbish bags
and cardboard boxes, all with handy blank spaces, acting
like fertilizer to ripen Ian's mind.
Abandoning computers, Ian now grabs his pen hard and
with vigour. He manipulates it in ways never before
heard or seen on this little Earth. Your face will implode
when faced with his fluids (from his pen). "Begone,
airbrushing; farewell, anti-aliasing," he chats,
dashing his computer against the rocks "I am a
man - a man, you hear? I need my hands to be dirty with
inky residue I want to feel my body. Men, men alone,
men together need not for effeminate graphic design.
They need pictures of weird animals and stuff".
So he strides free in the world, a man standing alone
in the world, naked and beautiful for all to see naked.
By Michael
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