From Star*Reach #7 (1977):
Please don’t try to order anything from that old GbP address. I have no idea if GbP is still a going concern, but BWS has a lovely Web site, so it’s easy enough to contact him about his current offerings, such as his new print, Poetry, published by Glimmer Graphics.
Man, BWS really slaved over that image, back in the day. That’s a “rough”? And BWS produced at least five of them? Whew! Anyone know if the print was ever published?
If Barry Windsor-Smith, sharing The Studio with Wrightson, Jones, and Kaluta in 1977, had strolled down to CBGB in NYC’s Bowery dressed like that, I doubt the punk rock crowd would have let him pass unscathed. Even the Studio 54 crowd would have chastised him for looking anachronistic.
Everything about that image of BWS seems to me to have been self-consciously selected and arranged: the embroidered peasant top and bell-bottom jeans, the pose (the artist ignores the camera in order to light a cigarette), the trio of art books piled haphazardly on the floor (with a thick monograph devoted to Lord Leighton on top!), the peacock feathers, the crudely matted artwork displayed on an artist’s easel, the plant and bottles on the elaborate pedestal, the background, all of it.
I’m just saying his outfit was already about 4-5 years out of fashion by 1977; perfect fit for Woodstock in ’69 or the Isle of Wight festival in 1970, but not in punk/disco ’77.
I understood your point, Chris, and I agree with you. Sorry if I gave some other impression.
BTW, just in case some readers missed it… the implied point of my October 2nd comment was that, while BWS’s outfit may have been 4-5 years out of fashion, his overall idea of art and the artist was at least 100 years out of fashion. And I don’t think, at the time, BWS would have been offended by that characterization; on the contrary, I think he’d have been proud of it.