Icky Thump: the art of Barnaby Ward

Everyone, it seems, likes this bloke’s work and it’s not hard to see why. Instantly appealing to the eye, his drawings of saucy waif’s and strange chimera suggest too many viewings of Yellow Submarine at too young an age, subsequently fed through a kaleidoscope of manga, anime and obscure Eurocomics. He lives and works on the island of Barbados, but the imagery he uses – particularly in his single illustrations – suggests he fell down a rabbit hole in Ladbroke Grove 1969 and has yet to emerge from the strange subterranean fantasy land that he discovered down there.

He’s been doing his thing for about six years now, after a period spent working in graphic design drove him to “relearn how to draw” using the now ubiquitous artists tools of Photoshop and Wacom tablet. Looking at his work I’d assumed it was all done with pen & paper, then scanned and coloured using a PC but it’s perhaps a testament to his skills that he’s able to so succesfully replicate the skittery line of the Isograph pen in a virtual medium.

His work has been published in the book Sixteen Miles to Merricks, but you’re more likely to see his imagery cropping up in all areas of the pop culture, which is ever hungry for new stylists. Not that there’s anything especially “new” about his style. It’s a consciously-assimilated nostalgia for a past he probably never directly experienced, but the carefully-considered colour palette and sparse compositions are undoubtedly eye-catching.

By far his most impressive work for me has been his “reimagining” of Alice In Wonderland, imbuing Carroll’s creations with a necessary sinister quality, and, in Alice, unleashing her sexuality by aging her a few years, dressing her like a porn star-cum-catwalk model, and leaving her at the mercies of Wonderland’s creepy inhabitants. These beg to be featured in a new edition of the story, though perhaps not one bound for the Children’s section in Waterstones.

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