Viva Brighton Issue #60 February 2018

THIS MONTH’S COVER ARTIST
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“I get asked a lot if my work’s science-fiction
based,” says this month’s cover artist Mark
Charlton. “It is and it isn’t. I love science fiction,
2001: A Space Odyssey, things like that, but that’s
not necessarily what inspires my work. It’s more
to do with man’s enthusiasm to go out into the
galaxy. I absolutely adore mid-century design and
that whole era of science and mankind coming
together. There was a famous comic in the 50s and
60s called The Eagle, which was very much aimed at
getting young boys into engineering, and they had
articles in there about mankind living on the moon
in, like, 50 years’ time. It was just an idea, but I get
excited about that idea, about a 50s perspective
on man jetting off into space, so my work sort of
stems from that feeling.”
Mark’s background is actually in animation,
rather than print design. For years he worked as
a freelance animator, creating music videos and
projections, before taking a change of direction.
“I’d always wanted to try screen printing, so I
bought some bits off eBay and learnt from videos
on YouTube. I then started experimenting with
screen printing onto different materials – onto
wood and mixed media pieces – and that was the
really early beginnings of trying to find my style.
Now I have stacks of different paper sources in my
studio and over time they age and discolour, so I
have a whole bank of this material, which produces
these really lovely textures.
“When you see my pieces up close, you can see
that they’re quite decayed and weathered. I like to
destroy what I’ve made, and I find the inner beauty
within the destruction of it. I build the composition
up over several weeks. In order to see the previous
layers I have to really weather the piece, so I might
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