THE GREAT POSTER EXPLOSION

If you remember it, you just were not there

Is it a bird? is it a plane? no…it’s… the great poster explosion of the 1960s -and if you remember it, you just were not there. At least that was our communal slogan for the 1960s. Really, it only got going around 1965-66, the year of the real start of the bloodbath that was the second Vietnam war.
This was the era of Sputnik, President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, the Civil Rights marches, Vietnam and the simmering cauldron of Northern Ireland.

We were all bright and starry-eyed, full of optimism and ambition. We felt the world was ours for the taking once we rid it of the old and the grey.

Getting my start in advertising

I was a fresh-faced kid just out of secondary school and within two years I was married with a young daughter and working as a creative in advertising. I was beginning to make real money, enough to move from the apartment myself and my then wife lived in, to buy a house big enough to rear a family.

I lived in Dublin, Ireland and working in a top ad agency meant more than earning a living, it meant I was working with many extraordinarily talented graphic artists, illustrators, photographers, TV directors, graphic designers and copywriters, all under the one roof back then.
No one had yet come up with the idea of small ‘boutique’ agencies so we were a big organization and I thrived on this marvelous creative, intellectual and artistic atmosphere and soaked up everything like a sponge.
In that hothouse environment we were constantly reminded of worldwide trends and as an advertising designer, I absolutely loved working on posters both indoor and outdoor.

Swinging London

The agency also was a mine of current magazines from Life, Stern, Vogue to more common periodicals. I was also flying to London quite a lot back then, producing, and once or twice directing, TV commercials. With the onset of ‘Swinging London’ (as described on the cover of Time and Life magazines) a new phenomenon was gaining ground rapidly and went from a stuttering start to an artistic landslide.
This was known as the famous ‘Great Poster Explosion’ and I was captivated. Determined to make my mark on this new exciting and innovative new artistic outlet I started my own poster company and by 1967 I was in the thick of it while still holding down my job in advertising. Remember, I had a family to support and while posters were just great fun and hugely fulfilling artistically they rarely made any kind of decent money.
During this period, I created dozens of beautiful posters, both for myself and for the various agencies in Ireland and in London where I was actually recognized as a worthy member of this new and groundbreaking movement.

My first venture into purely decorative posters began in 1967 with the publication of a bunch of new works, including the very first Che Guevara poster -not my iconic red and black ‘Viva Che’ of 1968 but with an earlier one-colour black on white poster. So you could say I had a good start 😉

My influences

These posters were sold in Dublin, London, and San Francisco through poster and print shops. This movement led me to the works and influences of the greats like Rick Griffin, Victor Moscoso, Stanley Mouse, and Wes Wilson. In London I was befriended by the wonderful mad, hippie Michael English of Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, The Human Host, and the HeavyMetal kids who also loved my work -although it was not quite up to their high standards at this time, that would come a year later.
Another influence was a strange art collective called The Fool, with extraordinary talented Dutch artists Simon Postuma and Marijke Koger at the helm producing mind-altering graphics and posters.

By the end of the decade, I was friends with many of these including my own favourite Roger Dean. The legendary English artist Alan Aldridge even hired me to be represented by his newly formed artist’s agency and he got me so many cool commissions from ads to posters to album covers. Simon Postuma of The Fool also became a good friend after we went on the tear during a very wild poster show in England. Of course, I must mention the influence of singer-songwriter Donovan in encouraging and inspiring so many of us (Donovan was the guy who brought the Beatles to India and had an endless stream of hits around that period). We all were connected by a crazy desire to change the world and make it a better, more exciting place and at least we tried.

Much later in the 90s, I became friends with Rick Griffen, Mouse and Kelley and many other American poster artists, all wonderful people, hugely influential and talented who in turn let me know how much they loved my own modest efforts.
Most important of all was the fact that they welcomed me into their world and encouraged me to be better, to even try to be amazing.

Believe me, that counted more than anyone could imagine as Ireland was a bit of a visually artistic backwater. We had Joyce, Beckett, Behan, Yeats and all the writers but nothing much visual that went beyond the boundaries of the Irish sea.
Now we were competing with the best and it was a real buzz too.
In my head I was part of a worldwide collective: we all knew each other, we all respected each other and we all tried to outdo each other.

Where did it lead?

Like every art movement that has ever been the poster scene was fragile and was stone dead by the end of the 70s but not before I had many posters produced under the Motif Editions imprint in London and Verkerke of Amsterdam.

It did not end there as I presumed it would but for me, it was just a new beginning.
In Dublin, in 1969 and 1970 I was producing my best poster work for Irish beat group Tara telephone and guess what?

One boozy night poet Eamon Carr of Tara Telephone was hanging with Philip Lynott of new Irish band Thin Lizzy and of course, Philip noticed these poster poems of mine and was stunned to discover, according to Eamon, that these were not from the hippie poster shops of Haight-Ashbury but by a local Irish artist.

A few months later his close friend -and a fellow football teammate of mine -Frank Murray, put myself and Philip together and the rest is history … all for another day.

-Jim FitzPatrick.2018