Trevor Brown is at full weight in Visual as the main cover artist for the Susan Lawly catalogue. The work spans about thirty-five years; the Susan Lawly partnership is the central relationship and the basis for the entry.
Brown was born in England in 1959 and worked through British illustration and underground publishing across the 1980s and into the early 1990s. He moved to Tokyo in 1993 and has worked from there for the thirty-plus years since. His style grew out of the British underground comics and transgressive illustration of the 1980s, among UK comics-and-illustration figures and the transgressive art near the industrial and noise scene. From Tokyo he has kept it up across significant gallery shows, self-published art books and the continuing cover-art partnership with Susan Lawly.
The Susan Lawly partnership runs from the early 1990s onward and covers nearly the whole of the label's post-Come-Organisation life. Brown's work for the catalogue is hand-rendered painting and illustration with his characteristic doll and bandaged-figure imagery, deliberately confrontational and pitched in line with the Whitehouse and Cut Hands sensibility. The fit between Brown's images and Bennett's direction is one of the period's most sustained single-band visual partnerships in power electronics.
The main Susan Lawly covers run across the Whitehouse catalogue of the 1990s (Thank Your Lucky Stars 1990, Twice Is Not Enough 1992, Never Forget Death 1992, Quality Time 1995, Mummy and Daddy 1998, Cruise 2001, Bird Seed 2003, Asceticists 2006, Racket 2007); across the Cut Hands catalogue (Afro Noise I 2011, later Bennett post-Whitehouse positions); across the Extreme Music From... compilation series (Japan, Africa, Women, Russia, Israel). The covers run right across the Susan Lawly years; the partnership is my main Visual entry for the second phase of power electronics.
Beyond Susan Lawly, Brown's music-scene partners include SPK (Graeme Revell), Diamanda Galás (a long cover-art partnership) and Foetus (Jim Thirlwell). The reading: Brown's work has, over the decades, been taken up by the transgressive-music scene as fitting its own sensibility.
Brown also works through self-published art books and gallery shows. The books include My Bloody Valentines, Rubber Doll, Lipstick Box, Forbidden Fruit and Li'l Miss Sticky Kiss, with self-publishing ongoing. The shows have run in Tokyo, the UK, the US and across Europe over the decades.
My reading: Trevor Brown is at full weight in Visual as the main Susan Lawly cover artist. The sustained partnership with Bennett across about three decades is the central work. His transgressive figuration has, across the noise, industrial and experimental scene, been taken up as fitting the sensibility that scene has cultivated.
VAGO · c. the Byzantine era