Straight out of the Ark ....

Deighton's cover for Ark 10

The last post on Deighton's cover art elicited not only some helpful emails but also a note from blog reader Caspar referencing the fantastic early illustrations Len produced for Ark magazine and expressing a desire to see someone dig them out and post them up. Well, never let it be said the Deighton Dossier doesn't listen to its readers!

Ark was - is - the in-house magazine for the Royal College of Art, produced by students as both a proving ground and showcase for the burgeoning British talents emerging in illustration, graphic design and production. Not only Deighton but contemporaries like friend and future cover designer Ray Hawkey, photographer Gordon Moore and designer Alan Fletcher were among the many students whose talents first became evident in Ark.

This explosion of British design talent - in contrast to the rather dull, everyday life of the fifties, a decade very much waiting for the sixties to arrive - is captured brilliantly in a book called Burning the Box of Beautiful Things by Alex Seago, which charts the "heady times" of the fifties and sixties in the UK's design scene as the postmodern moved from fringe to mainstream and conventional ideas about art and illustration were challenged the neo-Romantic, neo-Victorian sensibilities of the art establishment which students like David Hockney, Patrick Caulfield and Allen Jones railed against.